To Dream and Be Dreamt

For James Stewart, life was sacred and sensuous, mystifying and miraculous, brimming with meaning and magic. It was a dance, a feast, a holy sacrament. It was friendship and creativity play, the touch of skin on skin and the meeting of hearts. His poetry reflects how he lived, delighting in every extravagance of pattern and rhythm, image and rhyme. In these verses, whether he is beckoning a lover, gliding and shimmying through a dreamscape, or declaring his presence to all of creation, he doesn't hold back. This is how he demanded to live, how most of the time he did live. It pained him to encounter (in others and himself) the limiting human impulses to defend and to close, to fear and to judge. Marked early in life by societal prejudice (he was Black and gay) and personal tragedy (his sister's death), he was uncompromising in his determination to go deeper, to open wider, to keep challenging and dismantling the barriers of separation.James relished life and poured himself into it. His enthusiasm was infectious, his sensitivity, acute. Ritual, ceremony, dreamwork, invocation, sacred space-these were as necessary to James as food, both to nourish his spirit and to express his reverence and amazement at all that he saw and experienced. The aspirations and yearnings we hear in his poems would become the gestures he lived by, the gifts he extended, the connections he forged, in seeking to manifest those ideals.