Page 232
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Sir; Welcome Home" folds poem-making, an officer, classroom math, sails, stars beneath the sea, and shell-like loneliness into a homecoming that asks not to be changed.
The corrected transcript clarifies the maritime pressure of the page. Home is named in the title, but the body keeps moving undersea and away from ordinary stability, so welcome and alienation remain entangled.
'Sir; Welcome Home' names a homecoming but keeps drifting back underwater, never quite arriving. It opens with an offering - 'I say give the officer a poem when plunging' - and notes it is 'not easy to leave the ends of the Earth nice / fror those doing math back in the classroom,' setting sea-knowledge against schoolroom calculation. The sailing reverie - 'how terific a sheet to / sail and tack of jib' - gives onto an undersea vision: 'the beams of stars beneath thw sea,, / quick and gone through core to pick up molten / and shatter the other side.' Gender and loss tangle - 'difficult / to say she as a ship when there is no tit or / coming leaf to spend' - before the descent into solitude: 'I go down / and I am alone lost as a shell powerful as as the / last speck on Earth.' The plea 'do not let it change me' closes the page on resistance to transformation. Kept spellings 'fror,' 'terific,' and 'thw' are preserved.