Alan Kotok photo
By
Penn Kemp
At the State’s Expense: Cuba
Longing for summer long gone at home,
we trek nearly new clothes in our luggage.
Folks at the cheap hotel direct us to class.
We bag, then fairly and evenly distribute
paper, pencils and notebooks to pupils
at the school without supplies. But with
open windows to the ocean that swells
benignly in impossibly brilliant December.
These students study hard, we’re informed,
as they bend to their book in cotton shirts
bleached so white they gleam of sheer sun.
Outside seabirds screech plaintive freedom.
Our servers are doctors, engineers, Ph.Ds
without jobs in their chosen domain. They
wait table till their real work is recognized.
And send their kids to be equally educated
in the qualities of hope. And endurance.
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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