Coffee appears in the title of Matthew's haiku and then vanishes. The three lines never name it. They give us heat, children and small sips, and leave us to put the drink together ourselves. That withholding is the poem's first clever move. It turns a cup of coffee into a small riddle, with the title as the answer hanging above it.
The form is the classic haiku count. "Warm embers roasting" has five syllables, "Happy Children reminisce" seven, and "Tiny sips of glee" five. There is no rhyme, which suits a form where compression does the work rhyme does elsewhere. Each line ends in a full stop, so none spills into the next, and the three read like snapshots set side by side rather than one sentence unrolling. What links them is a shrinking of scale. The first line shows fire, the second shows people, and the third shows the smallest thing of all, a sip. The camera starts wide, with heat, and closes in until it is almost at the lips.
The imagery repays a slower look. "Embers" can point to the roasting of beans, but embers are also the glowing remains of a fire, warm rather than blazing. The poet chooses "warm," not "hot," and that one word makes the scene gentle and domestic. Embers also suggest a hearth, and a hearth is where people gather and swap stories, which prepares the ground for line two. Judging by the imagery, the embers may even stand for memory itself, something that once burned brighter and still gives off comfort.
Line two is the strangest and the most interesting. Children, we assume, have short pasts, so what could they reminisce about? The poem allows two readings. The children may be literal, gathered around something warm. Or the word may describe how coffee drinkers feel, grown-ups carried back to childhood by a smell and a taste. Given the "glee" of the last line, the second reading seems the richer one, though the poem never settles the question, and its ambiguity is part of the pleasure. The capital C in "Children" is also worth noticing. Whether deliberate or accidental, it makes the word stand taller than its neighbours, as if "Children" were less a group of kids than a state of mind.
Sound reinforces the mood. The m in "warm" and "embers" gives line one a low hum, like something heating. "Reminisce" ends in a hiss that slides straight into the s of "sips," so the sound of remembering carries over into the act of drinking. Then the last line brightens, with the short, quick vowels of "tiny" and "sips" followed by the long, open "glee," a word that finishes the poem on a smile.
The grammar adds something less obvious. The poem has only one true verb, "reminisce." The "roasting" of line one is a participle, a process rather than an action, and line three has no verb at all, only a noun phrase. So the single thing that actually happens in the poem is remembering. Everything else is atmosphere that makes that remembering possible.
That leads to the central idea: joy, here, comes in small portions. "Tiny sips" is a telling phrase, because nobody gulps what they want to savour. Against the big, hot word "roasting," the sip is almost comically small, yet it holds all the "glee." The poem suggests that a modest daily ritual, a warm cup and a moment's pause, can give back a feeling we assume we have left behind.
Nothing in the text tells us who Matthew is or when the poem was written, and it doesn't need that information. Its significance lies in how much it fits into seventeen syllables. It takes a form often linked with observing nature and sets it at the kitchen table, finding in an ordinary drink a whole chain of heat, memory and delight. It also hides its subject, so the reader has to do the small work of discovery, and the poem is quietly pleased when they do.