A king wants a cup of coffee, and someone must make sure the future hears about it. That mismatch between ceremony and appetite drives Dave Bonta's "The King's Coffee." In eight short lines, the poem sets the language of history, with its kings, posterity and official records, against the smallest of human wants. The result is quietly funny, then slightly sad.
The poem is built from four couplets, and each couplet is one complete sentence, like four entries in a ledger or four moves in a tiny fable. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines run from about four to seven syllables. That brevity gives the voice a dry, deadpan flatness. The speaker never raises his voice, even when announcing something grand. The line breaks do some of the comedy. "Let posterity know how" stops on "how" and makes us wait for the news, which turns out to be "the King desired coffee." After such a build-up, the payoff is deliberately trivial. Even the sound joins the two: the hard *k* of "King" returns in "coffee," as if the ruler and his drink were already tied together.
The speaker is an odd kind of scribe. He begins, "I troubled my hands / with rogue handwriting," and both phrases are slightly off. To "trouble" your hands makes writing sound like a burden or even a small injury. "Rogue" suggests handwriting that has slipped its leash, unruly and outside the law. That hints that the record may be unreliable. If posterity is to learn about the King from this scribbling, it will learn it crookedly. The poem seems to know that every record passes through some particular, flawed hand.
The third couplet is the strangest: "I heard for certain that / it would prove small pleasure." The phrase "heard for certain" is a contradiction, since hearing is hearsay and certainty is supposed to be firsthand. Perhaps that is the point. Rumor travels around kings, and everyone is sure of it. The prediction deflates the King's desire before it can be satisfied. Whatever he wants, the coffee will not give him much. "Small pleasure" also quietly echoes the earlier triviality of the request, so the poem seems to say that even the King's wants are small and even their fulfilment disappoints.
The final image carries the weight: "I gave a bottle of mist / at a great loss." A bottle of mist is something you cannot really hold, a container for what has no substance. One reading, and it is only an inference from the imagery, is that the speaker offers something airy and nearly worthless, perhaps like the steam rising from a cup, and yet pays dearly for it. The poem never says who receives the gift or what the loss is. That openness is part of its power. The last line is the shortest, and it ends on the flat, heavy word "loss," which lands like a door closing after the lightness of "mist."
The poem is significant for how much it implies in so little space. It asks what history is actually made of, and suggests that behind the large vocabulary of kingship there may be ordinary longing, petty disappointment and unrecorded cost. The speaker's labor, the troubled hands and the great loss, is spent on a record about a cup of coffee, which makes his devotion both absurd and touching. The poem also enacts what it describes. It is itself the message to posterity, written in rogue handwriting, so we are left reading a record of a trivial wish that turns out to have been expensive.
The title gives us a king and a drink and promises a story. What we get is a shrug, a rumor and a vanishing bottle. In a few lines the poem shows that the things we hand down to the future are often fragile, partial and strangely beautiful for it.