Tony Webster photo
By
Penn Kemp
Fifty Years On: Walking on the Moon in Moulay Ibrahim
We have landed they tell us
in the centre for all Morocco
of magic & the old ways
high in the Atlas mountains
Moulay Ibrahim.
We have heard this.
What we have not heard or seen
happens for the first time
today via the one TV in the one cafe:
Apollo astronauts land on the moon
& high-step in slow motion, gawky
in grey scale.
“Ha!” says Omar. “What a stunt.
Those Americans are so clever.
But we know. Moroccans
are not easily tricked. This
is a fiction to entertain the people.
Quelle blague.”
He pretends to toss
a rock off the dusty floor at the screen.
The crowd in the cafe laugh
at the outlandish gear, the preposterous
instrument & helmet gimmicks
clumsier than any cartoon.
Still scoffing, the moon men jostle outside
& hidden in hooded dun djellabas
melt into the lunar dusk of their grey plateau.
Mary McDonald photo
Penn Kemp
Penn Kemp is the author most recently of Fox Haunts (Aeolus House, 2018) and Local Heroes (Insomniac Press, 2018). New eco-poems, including her multimedia collaboration with artist Mary McDonald on www.riverrevery.ca, will be published as River Revery (Insomniac Press, 2019). Quattro Books has published two other works, Barbaric Cultural Practice, and an anthology Penn edited, Jack Layton: Art in Action.
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