Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems

by James Baldwin

Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work.

Finney

Then, perhaps they imagine that their crimes are not crimes? Perhaps. Perhaps that is why they cannot repent, why there is no possibility of repentance. Manifest Destiny is a hymn to madness, feeding on itself, ending (when it ends) in madness:

the people moving, homeless, through the city, praying to find sanctuary before the sky and the towers come tumbling down, before the earth opens, as it does in Superman. They know that no one will appear to turn back time, they know it, just as they know that the earth has opened before and will open again, just as they know that their empire is falling, is doomed, nothing can hold it up, nothing. We are not talking about belief.

even our names are hand-me-downs and you don’t change that by calling yourself X: sometimes that just makes it worse, like obliterating the path that leads back to whence you came, and to where you can begin.

I would like to believe you. But we are not talking about belief.

Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie.

Time is not money: time is time. And a man is a man, my brother, and a crime remains a crime.

It may, indeed, precisely, be all that they claim as History. Those who required, of us, a song, know that their hour is not long. Our children are the morning star.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn, and that, I see, which does not guarantee power to draw the next breath, nor abolish the suspicion that the brightest hour we will ever see occurs just before we cease to be.

You’d best believe it’s cold outside. Nobody wants to go where nothing is everything and everything adds up to nothing.

My Lord, Author of the whirlwind, and the rainbow, Co-author of death, giver and taker of breath (Yes, every knee must bow), I understand it now: the why is not the how.

Between holding on, and letting go, I wonder how you know the difference.

the lightning has no choice, the whirlwind has one voice.

the crown ain’t given to the also-ran.

One does not always walk in light.