The Secondhand

By Jack Joseph Smith

These purple waves of killers across the regretful clouds The loudest colors of the land spot the religious sand The savage young men are dressed for the desert, and every desert is in their mind They think they are on horses instead of machines And they believe that their hatred has churned into the voice of an inner god Raming the rod Cracking the staff The farmer has lost measure and choice His family's waterless thirst is their throats split in half
As the purple ghost sings "This slaughter is easy for me I can slash this sword into a dream It is just a knife without a tree Machete child you've seen everything" Once green ground now discolored The hard red sun and the thick slick water Their floating does not favor and is not familiar to the damaged myth father and mother followed To be gone On the far side of slow motion, without a camera or sound They reach for their own And risk their heart And offer their hands
The limbs madness takes quantified by the pound This twisted anquish This satantic issued sorrow to see through this violent lens The distruction of the first souls, decreed simply because, from the beginning of man, they never wavered from grace Just the word insidiousness, even absent of assistance, has a certain sword of terror that swings Through the sleeplessness, and the damning of the dark At the massive edge of life and death
All appears to be a trick A glimmer. and the scourge arrives, at the quick This devastation so sinister Spread as a terrible spill over the lovely and lonely Savannas The sweeps of the villages into the hiding hills The image is of the wild animals, standing in rows, bewildered and untouched, while predator hell continues on by with its priorities When the other world labors your bones It is the hatred in our soul and sense When we wear the black rocks you rinse That you should be the ones left alone
The shrill and the kill cutting like cane The centaur's strut across the southern plain Stretch the Sioux from where our own were slain Seldom seen a tear drop from the starving sane The children are the secondhand Across their immense land One by one they do not glimpse The reason why Their's is the end of all our time gone by

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A vision of atrocity and inherited suffering in which war, drought, colonial violence, and spiritual corruption are felt through the bodies of children and the wounded land.

The poem's force comes from scale changes: mythic language, historical echoes, and close human suffering collapse into the same field.

Claude

A five-page apocalyptic vision of slaughter and inherited violence, opening on 'purple waves of killers / across the regretful clouds' and 'savage young men' who 'think they are on horses / instead of machines' and believe 'their hatred / has churned into the voice / of an inner god'. It moves through a thirsting farmer's family, a taunting 'purple ghost' ('This slaughter is easy for me'), wildlife 'standing in rows, / bewildered and untouched', and the Sioux 'from where our own were slain', before naming the inheritors: 'The children are the secondhand / Across their immense land', whose lives are 'the end / of all our time gone by'.

The title's 'secondhand' carries a double charge - the children receive violence at second hand, as inheritance, and they are also the 'second hand' of a clock counting down 'all our time gone by'. The poem operates at the scale of atrocity rather than the personal: drought, machete and 'Machete child', colonial and genocidal echoes ('Stretch the Sioux'), villages swept 'into the hiding hills', and a 'predator hell' that passes 'on by with its priorities'. Its theological turn is bitter - 'The distruction of the first souls, / decreed simply because... / they never wavered from grace' - suggesting innocence itself invites destruction. The recurring imagery of swords, knives, and cane that cuts ('cutting like cane') binds agricultural and martial violence into one. The power lies in the refusal to look away or shrink the scale, holding the slaughter in a single sustained, rhyme-driven gaze. Preserve source spellings exactly: 'Raming', 'satantic', 'anquish', 'distruction', 'Savannas', 'charish' where present.