Archtown Beer

Astride the gates of Archtown

sits the behemoth of beer,

accepting its homage of praise

by the name we know it here:

The Brewery.

It offer us a choice to drink,

versions and colors and taste;

we accept our can or bottle,

taking care not a drop to waste.

The Brewery.

The names avalanche our palates:

Budweiser, Michelob, and Busch,

Bud, Natural, Beck’s, and Bass,

Lowenbrau, Czechvar, O’Douls,

all dancing with Stella Artois;

ice, amber, amberbock, light,

select, cactus, raspberry, lime,

ale and clamato chelada,

lager and dragon fruit peach.

The Brewery.

I am a vassal of ArchTown,

I who enjoy beer the least.

I bike past blocks of brewing,

inhaling the smell of the yeast.

The Brewery.

TweetSpeak Poetry is celebrating Oktoberfest with a series of poetry prompts about wine and beer. This week, Seth Haines has asked for a poem about the beer that is known or enjoyed locally or regionally. If you live in St. Louis, that means one thing: The Brewery (although there is a small brewery here, too, the exception proving the rule: Schlafly). Check TweetSpeak Poetry to see what other regional beer poems have been submitted.

This poem is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see other poems submitted, please visit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Color and Descent

We sit on a hillside, still

green but the leaves are

turning in the endless cycle

of color and descent.

Between us rests a half-full,

half-empty bottle of dark rich

red, and we drink the liquid

grapes and we drink the prayers

and the sweat of the Rhinelanders

who settled here and dug stones

from the ground and planted and

survived and flourished and died,

adding their bones to the stone

and the clay and the soil, to birth

new memories of bottles of red,

and bottles of white.

About 40 minutes west and southwest, and 50 minutes south of St. Louis begins Missouri wine country. The area around Hermann and Augusta, Mo., was certified as an official US wine district even before any areas of California received the designation (as stubborn as Missourians can be, they managed to agree on classifications before the Californians did). Oktoberfest is big in this region. The wine industry died during Prohibition but began making a comeback in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, some 16 wineries are located in the area.

This poem is submitted for the prompt at TweetSpeak Poetry, which in October is all about wine and beer. (Seth Haines, who’s behind the prompts, must be getting free samples for promoting this.)

This poem is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

The bottle of wine in the photograph is Augusta Winery’s Norton, made from the Cynthiana grape, and my personal favorite.