By: Adreyo Sen

Those tea shops are the happiest
that are unaware
that they have a heart,
a heart that unseen and lonely
and overlooked.
calms Impatience fuming in and out
to get itself a latte.

This tea shop too has a heart,
though no one knows she exists,
even when she saves coffee cups
from the excitement of stray elbows.
Captive to its manic rhythms from dawn
to dusk,
she sweeps and hums and between tables,
runs.

The children know her when they are sad
or nursing a broken elbow or
simply mystified by life.
They cling to her as she sings
and bakes them goodies and from paper napkins,
fashions intricate things,
a paper plane, a paper pony, even a
paper battleship.

And when the tea shop’s heart,
frail and quietly pretty in a print frock
leaves that ancient door one last
time, will the busy baristas know,
as the children of the tea shop do,
that the tea shop has finally,
has finally lost its heart?