Page 123
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Sharpness in the soul becomes courage, anger, harvest, mortality, and refusal, as the poem links death, labor, nourishment, and the body's boundaries in a harsh communal vision.
This page has unusual density. Its force comes from how quickly it moves from private feeling to collective survival and back again.
'Something sharp in the soul' moves at speed from private nerve to communal dread. It opens with 'Courage in question / to make you angry' and the blunt 'No one wants to lie and die / in a bad way', then enlarges the self to cosmic scale: 'Your not a circle / your the sides of the world'. The harvest turns grim - those 'who harvest our / nourishment are the sons of death' - and 'Slight of hand lets them know'. It closes on a hard paradox: 'Death as thought is true', and 'though death is never done / You are neither done with death'. The source spellings ('Wh', 'spesk') keep the page raw and unsmoothed.