Easter and Time

By Jack Joseph Smith

There are those who embody time Those who will never come again Certainly not through a close up Say over fifty years you look Greatness that walks once Viewing film we touch that which is receint Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence Mohammed Ali, Frank Sinatra Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King With all the violence They are love instead And so quickly they are close While so quickly they could go Yet with Jesus as the solitude of your life
You have been made also ancient in kind There in the same demention wherein we perceive our own living death after death as a companionship with the eternal body of Christ And here at Easter Year after year He re-enters ever new worlds As one should know a truth when its very form has stood within their step And there you have the physical From the Garden to the Donkey To a Supper, a Cross and a Tomb
And all that leads in tandem To the parade of Easter And all that comes after Is what those with the experience of drought and famine Know as the sweetness of thunder

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about historical greatness, mortality, Christ, and renewal, culminating in Easter as a figure for return after drought and famine.

It is one of the most openly devotional pieces in the set, but it still keeps the collection's larger concern with embodiment and history.


Claude

A three-page meditation that sets historical 'greatness that walks once' - 'Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence / Mohammed Ali, Frank Sinatra / Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King' - against the recurring, ever-renewing figure of Christ, 'who / re-enters ever new worlds' each Easter. It traces the physical Passion 'From the Garden to the Donkey / To a Supper, a Cross and a Tomb' and ends by naming Easter, for those who have known 'drought and famine', as 'the sweetness / of thunder'.

The poem contrasts two relations to time: the great figures 'embody time' but 'will never come again' and can only be 'touch[ed]' through film 'over fifty years' later, whereas Christ is not captured but repeated, re-entering 'ever new worlds / Year after year'. Out of this the speaker draws a startling claim about the believer - 'with Jesus as the solitude / of your life / You have been made / also ancient in kind' - so that participation in 'the eternal body / of Christ' confers a share of that recurrence, a 'living death after death'. The closing image earns its weight through drought: for those who have known famine, thunder is not threat but promise, the sound that precedes rain, and so Easter is rendered as relief rather than spectacle. Preserve source spellings 'receint' and 'demention' as written.