‘White Linen Collars’

Simon Piesse is an emerging visual artist from London, UK. Previous work has been published by Beyond Words and Carlotta Gallery. He is inspired by nature, urban architecture and the creativity of his talented Amnesty International Youth Group.

White Linen Collars

White linen collars.
Smooth shots of rum.
The power of dollars
sets the story under the sun.

You see the bar,
the fisherman,
the bronze memory poured into a glass,
a myth with salt on its rim.

What you do not see
are the years reshaped
by immigrant fingers,
hands that carried more than luggage,
hands that stitched a country
into other soil.

The scholar named it.
Framed it.
Exported it.

And so, you arrive already knowing
what Cuba dreamed to be.

White linen collars.
Smooth shots of rum.

But until you throw out the scholar,
until you abandon his old man into the sea.
You will never wear the white linen collar
and taste what the rum remembers.

George Abreu is a writer and poet based in Pennsylvania. His work engages themes of inheritance, displacement, class, mortality, and the emotional architecture of everyday life. Blending meditative lyricism with narrative clarity, his poems examine how personal histories intersect with larger cultural forces and his Cuban/American upbringing.