With great tenderness: “Love” by Jamaica Baldwin
Love
If not the word, then the stillness.
Let us linger here awhile.
If not the song, then the brushstroke.
Gentle. I am tender-headed.
This is how to love me,
with your hand holding the pain off at the root.
Jamaica Baldwin
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When I first read this poem I loved it up till the last line and then I hated it. Well, maybe not hate but I was left with a strong distaste. I did not like it at all. I struggled with the selection because there were many great possibilities in the manuscript that expanded in conversation with Jamaica while she was working on it.
In the end, Jamaica called it and I couldn’t deny: "Love" was a perfect pick for our project. Format-wise, tone-wise, language-wise. It stands alone while holding the complexities that wrap through the heart of her book. And it holds them in a scant six lines with great tenderness and no simplification.
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I’ve lived with this poem about six months now, through many readings, lots of feeling, deep calls with the poet, letter by letter typesetting, and typographic detail-tending. That timeframe happens to coincide with a major life change: I moved in with my partner after seven years of living alone. I realize now that I didn’t like that last line when I first read it because it’s true. For me personally. It’s hard to love and be loved. Sometimes it even hurts. It means being seen, and witnessing, ever more intimately. Which is beautiful and uncomfortable. I’m grateful I get to live with a person I love and I’m grateful to have this poem to help me.
Wishing you much love, down to all your roots.
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About Jamaica Baldwin
Jamaica Baldwin is a poet and educator. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, as well as the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award. Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains (an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective), and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York. Learn more on her website here.
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Links
Get the book here: Bone Language and the print here: Love.
