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Viewing Picasso’s “Guernica”/photo by Angela Hu/CCBY 2.0/via Wikimedia Commons

 

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Sketches of Spain or Guernica

 

The earth has got a fever of 103, and I’ve
found Langston Hughes languishing
on the sidewalks of NYC.

Piano keys were dancing in the wind;
Thelonious Monk was bluer than blue,
his slouch hat rolling to Timbuktu.

Picasso made cubist portraits of his lovers,
Man Ray took surreal pictures of them too;
Lester Young played in dim lit Paris clubs.

And the Sketches of Spain are always playing
just as the picture of Guernica always hangs
in the galleries of our collective minds.

As I smoked a cigarette w/ Gregory Corso
and talked to Allen Ginsberg about Blake,
I felt that everything would be okay, for

somewhere a trumpeter is blowing cool,
somewhere a sax player plays the moon
just like Black Orpheus played his lute.

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D. H. Jenkins’ plays have been staged in California, Arizona, Australia, and Japan.  His poems appear in the art films “Call From a Distant Shore” and “Our Autumn,” and in  The Tiger Moth Review and  Jerry Jazz Musician.

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Listen to the 1960 recording of Miles Davis performing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” from Sketches of Spain [Columbia]

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