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photo by Mystic Art Design/Pixabay

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Round Midnight in Ocho Rios

Round Midnight at the Silver Seas Hotel
and falling stars parade through
an espresso black sky in Ocho Rios.
Caribbean waves lap against the sea wall
like brushes swishing against a snare.

I’m drinking Blue Mountain coffee on the patio
as three waiters smoke a spliff wrapped in newspaper
and I wonder if they’re talking patois or if my mind
has gone out to sea on a contact high.

I’ve come to Jamaica to feel the sun, to escape
the gray latitudes; I’ve come to Jamaica
to take my place in a world of Kodachrome
and to shed the black and white of youth.

And Round Midnight the tenor sax of my
coffee wakened self lures me out to the pier
where the easy breeze wafts like a muted
trumpet on a distant drum beat shore.

That’s when I took off my northern clothes,
diving in, hastily swimming off into manhood
following that original midnight lure,
coming to on many an exotic shore.

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DH Jenkins worked as an associate professor of English/Speech for the Univ. of Maryland in Japan and Korea for many years. His jazz play, Ti Jean, about Jack Kerouac, has been staged in Tucson, AZ and in St. Joseph, MO. Thirteen of his poems are set to music in the film Call From a Distant Shore, a collaboration with musician/artist Bill Scholer, June 2020.

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Listen to a 1966 recording of the guitarist Baden Powell playing “‘Round Midnight”

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