Poetry: Echosightings Vol III, SPIRIT OF JAMAICA

Don who?
Forty years a 
Daughter of the soil
And yet she had
No clue
So what
Of Alphanso
Tommy
Brevett and
Sterling the last man
Standing
From the era when bands
ruled the musical roost
When spots like
Glass Bucket
Silver Slipper
And La Parisienne
pulsated
To the stratosphere
with that unique
Sound
Through a long-belled
Horn
The reluctant star
Wailed
The sigh of Trade Winds
melded with lapping
Waves
set to the beat of
Resistance
A mystery to the
Insulated
Such as she
Now the beat's
Reverberated
throughout the world
Reaching a new generation
Such as the one
she lays to sleep each night
with foreign lullabies
They're already inured to
canned food of
Overproduced sounds and
empty celebrities
For the parents
unpredictable Don
And his wanton eccentricities
Are a horror show
Worse than
The nightly news
The hidden majesty of
Drummond's blues
Is lost on them
But the little girl
inside the big exec
Knows better
She'd joyously move to
The ska
If only we'd
Let her

Poetry: "O YEA! O YEA!....

Justice Fox  presiding
God save the Queen!"
Far though she may be
from the heart of the matter
the strains of
Blue beat swirl
around Buckingham
For the defense
Patterson
Spaulding
Then young radicals of
The bar
Looking to make
grander names for themselves
Amid the rabid audience
And set the stage
For coming political
Stardom
With testimony from Corporal Pennycooke, Conchita,
doctors, players
And others who can no longer
tell tales
Insanity a convenient exit
For a crew struggling to
take the wheel
Of a vehicle careening 
toward it's own
Redemption
The driver having long since
Relinquished control
His gaze fixed on a point
Indiscernible to
Everyone else
The knife a
blood-stained
Signpost pointing out
A cul-de-sac
A sharp change in direction
A double edged
Destiny
For the Man

The music
The nation