No Vacation
By Raymond A. Mazurek
I. Remembering
Towers of brown concrete and steel
line the beach and reflect the morning sun,
each with a balcony that is private,
a capitalist’s dream of peace.
Thinking how you, father, would have loved this Vacasa,
the vacation you could never afford.
But every summer you took us to the beach
on day trips, and you would stand at the water’s edge,
smiling and gazing out to sea
while my sister and I frolicked in the waves.
I knew nothing
of what sixty-hour weeks in the factory meant,
with two weeks off each July when the mill was shut.
The ocean does not know poverty or wealth,
and is free to those with the time and means.
Money and time, which no poor man takes for granted,
for nothing is free.
II. The Present
I walk with delight at the water’s edge,
surrounded by happy groups of children.
The father pauses, two small girls clinging,
they run together, fall into the waves,
suspended laughing in the long arms of love.
All this will end, the climate will reverse,
oceans will live when humans are no more,
and spit out other life and start again.
The ocean knows, and waits.
III. No Vacation from the News
I was once poor, but there are those
who have less than nothing.
The visible ribs of children starved in Gaza,
in the arms of desperate fathers.
The men kept alive in cages in Florida,
dehumanized for the crime of wanting work
and dignity, to find better lives for children.
This is not the United States
of the imagination.
This is reality,
brutal beyond words.
Raymond A. Mazurek grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and attended Colby College with various forms of financial aid. He wrote poetry extensively as a young man, but more or less stopped in graduate school. In the past year, he has returned to writing poetry after a long hiatus. His poems have been published in The Blue Collar Review and The Eunoia Review. He has also published many essays on literature and on working-class studies, and has taught at Purdue, Southern Illinois, Penn State, and Alvernia.
Photo credit: James Thornett via a Creative Commons license.
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