From 'The Double V' Poem by Morgan Michaels

They stopped and stared ahead to where a patch of hot blue appeared in through the treetops, billowing tautly.

'Bamos' ordered Miggi, gesturing ahead.

They walked toward the blue, which loomed larger with every step, until it grew, wondrously, into a tent top- gently conical and sloping- in the middle of a clearing palisaded by ashen palm trunks, from which fronds hung down like glistening pennants. A little ways behind the tent rose the smooth forehead of a cliff. In the face of the cliff was the mouth of a cave. The cave was understood by the natives to be a bomb-shelter, whose earlier use had been cautiously and gradually left behind. For seniors, it was a reminder of times past. Men entered and exited the cave with slat cages containing roosters. They talked to their roosters lovingly through the bars of the cage.

The canopy was spread over a scaffolding of raw saplings, slender and stripped of side branches, that spoked-out radially from a vertical central pole. There seemed to be no shortage of trees in Cuba. Smaller cross branches were lashed to the spokes with vine. Altogether, they formed a tight, light lattice. Like many things Cuban, it gave the impression of improvisation but was really quite sturdy.

Langley associated tents with circuses and county fairs or tiresome campus graduations. He thought Miggi had brought him to a kind of farmer's market, to watch the natives barter. He looked around for...