Being Angry Is Believing The Anger
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A poem structured as moral commandments — tamper not with the creator, intimidate not prayer, take not the worker's life — that builds toward the admission that self-defense is a serious moving fear, ending with ten thousand trees in terror after an explosion.
The biblical cadence gives the poem its authority, while the final image of dynamite and trees in terror breaks the frame of moral instruction with raw violence.
A poem written as commandments and their reasons, opening on a blunt accusation ('YOU ARE ANGRY WITH') and then warning against tampering with creation, intimidating prayer, murdering time, and taking 'the worker's life,' each paired with a near-scriptural gloss ('the meek shall inherit the earth,' 'mankind is time'). Its title supplies the thesis: anger is a form of belief in the very thing it opposes. The argued calm breaks at the end, where 'self defense is a serious moving fear,' and 'once through the dynamite / I saw some ten thousand trees in terror.'
The structure stages a debate between moral counsel and lived violence: stanza after stanza recommends restraint and forgiveness ('for what he does he many times knows not of'), only for the final tercet to detonate that composure with an image the homilies cannot absorb. 'Ten thousand trees in terror' personifies a whole landscape as witness to an explosion the poem will not classify as defense or aggression - the dynamite simply happened, and fear is what it revealed. The poem's honesty is in refusing to let its own commandments resolve the terror they were meant to prevent. The text is clean enough to read closely, and the source spelling 'lightening' does not appear here.