Jazz Flag, by DH Jenkins

Icarus (Icare) from Jazz, by Henri Matisse (France) 1947

Jazz Flag

A silhouette swims across the starry night,
darkness in a midnight blue backdrop;
A splotch of red where the acrobat's heart is,
representative of a dozen of the best.

And above in the velvet depths of openness,
we see those stars Sirius, Vega, Cassiopeia,
as well as Parker, Gordon, Davis, Coltrane,
Hughes, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Corso.
​
Like officers of the line, those heroic artists
just kept on fighting this society's emptiness
by endless improvisation—all emanating
from a red splotch of the acrobat's heart.

Each session—a variation on the ordinary,
but at the same time something new,
and we raise this flag just after sunset
and listen to changes that are always true.

​DH Jenkins

DH Jenkins' poems have appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician, The Tiger Moth Review, The Global South, Bellowing Ark and The Wave. For many years he was a professor of Speech and Writing for UMUC-Asia, living and working in Japan and Korea. He now lives in New Zealand and enjoys hiking in the Southern Alps as well as scuba diving and snorkeling in the Pacific Islands.