Caffeinate your world. Haikus celebrate java and joe

Would Keats and Shelley have been able to resist? Compose a haiku on joe and win fleeting fame by having your poem printed on an eco-friendly coffee cup.

That was the caffeine challenge issued to its customers by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. of Waterbury, Vt., and today the company said it is gearing up to unveil on its website 14 haikus that romance the coffee bean.

The winning haikus will also be featured on the company's paper cups from now until the end of the year, the company said.

And these are not just any paper cups, mind you. Many paper cups have linings whose ingredients include petroleum products. Not Green Mountain Coffee. The company says its hot cups "use a bio-plastic made from plants and other fully renewable resources." Presumably, that means that haiku-winning authors can rest assured that verses immortalized on these cups are bio-degradable.

As poets know, a haiku is a poem of 17 syllables on three lines - five on the first line, seven on the second, five on the third. To rate a place on an eco-friendly cup, a winning Green Mountain haiku "had to be about how coffee makes a difference, either in the world or in an individual's day," the company said.

Here's a winning entry from Nicole Bianco of Pittsburgh:

If forced to decide
Between coffee and fine wine
Well, please pass the cream.

To check out other winning haikus, please click here.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)