Page 347
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Somehow says Heaven cannot be felt until the impossible is done, then weighs Earth, peace, violence, America, windows, television, animal, human, and a handwritten uncertain line before going someplace.
The moral argument is clear: peace and violence are not clean opposites, and human and animal categories are moving toward a shared destination. The handwritten ending has been kept as a conservative scan-backed reading, which makes the final motion feel stranger and more bodily.
'Somehow' argues that Heaven cannot be felt 'until the impossible is done,' then collapses easy moral opposites: 'The suffering of peace' and 'The horror of violence' are 'Not so much different, itself, in God's eyes.' America is the stage where people 'turn, and yell, against one and another,' seen 'Through a window or a television.' The poem presses the boundary between 'what is animal, and what is human' toward a shared destination, closing on the conservatively read handwritten line 'A drop Her's ice / is going someplace' - a strange, bodily final motion.