Kitties

By Jack Joseph Smith

Kitties will take your heart Kitties will also make you watch the wildness in this world in a more careful way They will grow old with a child through their teens While there at their threshold They will look the same as the day you brought them home, and immediately knew you loved them As the day when they will show so much courage Saying now I have to go Yes, all through life with your kittie
He or she will not display fear And for certain you will know All along the way, kitties view, as traveling time Through very good and private times As well as those of servere strife Your kittie, or kitties, will have changed your life

Original Scan

Page 51
Page 52

AI Interpretation

GPT

A gentle poem about cats, attachment, aging, and the small private courage that animals teach the people who love them.

Its tenderness is direct and unusually unguarded for the collection.


Claude

The poem begins with the emotional claim (kitties will take your heart) and immediately complicates it: they will also make you watch the wildness. Love for animals is presented not as comfort but as education — the cat teaches you to see what is untamed in yourself and in the world.

This is the collection's gentlest poem, but its gentleness is precise rather than sentimental. The wildness the cats reveal is not cute but genuinely wild, and the heart they take is genuinely taken.