This is Episode 51 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Munich, Winter 1973 (for Y.S.)" by James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an American essayist, novelist, playwright and poet who died in 1987. 

His writing often captured the dual complexity of African-American experience and homosexuality: Baldwin was a gay black man, who left the US in his early 20s to live and work in France, in large part because of the daily indignities of racism in America. 

Despite being friendly with some of the leaders of the Black Civil Rights movement, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Baldwin nevertheless resisted the straightforward narratives of race that were drawn in some protest literature of the time. 

In the words of one of his biographers, he resented the "categorization of human beings" because categorizations "deny life". 

In this poem we can see something of Baldwin’s awe and wonder for all life’s complexity—its beauty, its love, its desire and its uncertainty.

You can read the poem here

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