Today’s poem is about Don Drummond and his ill-fated lover Margarita Mahfood.
song lyrics HERE

Part I:   Lyric Line of Flight

Lebanese soul keening in the sea breeze of Jamaican dusk / falling into Caribbean depths from Levantine heights / Jah dawta danced her way from Lemuria to Penchuria / transported to the border from the country of madness / her steps sliding in the trombone’s skanking plaint /  Queen Mother of Eden, world’s first woman / calls from island foliage to her King of Ace / singing from the interstices of her rib / where Eve turns Abel in Canaanite love / the notes of her melody slightly off / like country-style horns / dissonance sharply arresting / was he Adam or Lucifer to her ? / why did he enter her garden ? / no trace left of Margarita / just one pearl of pulsating thunder / love lost in the bloodshot eyes of her musical murderer / play on

Part  II:  Poem

Margarita in Limbo 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!

Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Rolling in calmly, herald of thunder
the border crossed—and then the madness reigns.
Subliminal rip-tides drag us under
while the Arawak arrow-poison drains.

Your Penchurian passport stamped: Anita . . .
we follow your voice to Eden in memory.
Pearl of great price in limbo—Margarita
you sing us a paradise purely sensory.

Xaymaca met Lebanon on your isle
in Nature’s temple of living pillars.
The trombone slid as you flashed a smile,
turning rude boys into Rasta killers.

You sang of a forest where word is thought
where love flows free in harmony’s vein . . .
in death your fame arrived unsought;
a three-minute heroine you remain—

but those three minutes liberate time,
set free the thunders of our soul
explode the colors of a tropic clime
where musical rhythm paints the whole.

The skank turns into something different;
volatile, combusting like flaming rum.
The island downpours’ dark effluent
washes your wound. Selassie soon come . . .