The Floating Television
In Old Havana
the first television drifted
from home to home.
Payment plans
were a new temptation,
even though few could afford
more than one or two months
of eerie magic.
After thirty days, or sixty,
the floating box of ghostly images
was repossessed, loaded, and moved
on donkey carts or trucks
to the next eager family
waiting for dreams.
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Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several books about the island. The Poet Slave of Cuba, A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Henry Holt & Co., 2006), a young adult book written entirely in free verse, has received the Americas Award and an International Reading Association Award, and is a finalist for a PEN Center USA Literary Award. It just received the Pura Belpre Award, the American Library Association’s highest honor for Hispanic literature for young people. Short works appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Caribbean Writer, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Nimrod, and Poetry Salzburg. Margarita’s next book is The Surrender Tree, forthcoming from Henry Holt and Co. in April 2008.
