By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page counts upward through love, war, travel, and loss, turning a simple number sequence into a hard spiritual itinerary.
The counting gives the poem a nursery-rhyme surface, but it keeps darkening until the trips become stations of the cross. The closing turns loss into a test of whether the reader still possesses anything at all.
'Basic Dad' uses a child's counting-rhyme - 'One,, two, three', 'Four, five, six and seven', on to fourteen - as the spine of a father's grim itinerary for a child's life. Each cluster of numbers names a stage: love 'is easy', 'war / is a hard way to begin', and the handwritten shout 'PLACES OF DANGER' breaks the nursery surface as the father admits 'I try and watch you through / your path'. The trips finally 'become / The stations of the cross', and the poem closes on a paradoxical consolation - 'if ever in your time / You have felt loss / It is certain / That you don't have it now' - present possession standing as proof against past grief.