Beginning

By Jack Joseph Smith

We were ‘born Paper airplane hats went around turning out the lights The white sheets were starched enough to creak And the nuns had still starched wings for breasts too While the-orphanage warden was a laymen Who was the-one coming in wearing a black tie To carry out the order that it was to black for light He was as busy-es a mm without a saint And the mms were as mmb as a statue without blue paint The assistents carried pencils and pads : But they: didn't wear robes - They got to wear-skirts (while) They told each other in secret they didn't want to do it: S86 the reason for the skirts was that they were still to loose-for Jesus WEEN the lizhts ‘went out on the demand of a SIREN Thet- hed TO BEGOD'S whistle to us It was ail in the nature-o? duty's novice obedience To go to the switch To the ends:of the corridor- Issuing us the new sounds of blackness And to the edge of each others ‘white cloth Is where the nuns pele hands were- touching We infents, knew blackness vas not unusual But the big DCCTCRPRISST seened right from the whispers- While me were to lete to now it was World Yar IT 1941 immediately young And Los Angeles vas efraid of Japan

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A vivid memory of wartime infancy in a Los Angeles orphanage during 1941, where nuns, paper airplane hats, starched sheets, and blackout sirens compose a scene of institutional origin that is both absurd and ceremonial.

The poem blends the comic details of institutional life with the gravity of World War II, making childhood memory and historical crisis share the same darkened corridor.

Claude

The 'beginning' is not birth but the moment consciousness arrives — in a blacked-out orphanage, 1941, Los Angeles afraid of Japan. The nuns' starched wings double as breasts, the assistants wear skirts because they are 'still too loose for Jesus,' and the big doctor-priest emerges from whispers. Every detail insists that origin is institutional, comic, and sacred at once — and that the infant already knew blackness was not unusual.

The poem's power lies in its refusal to sentimentalize. The wartime blackout and the orphanage lights-out merge into a single darkness, and the child's first knowledge is that the world begins in someone else's command to switch things off.