Soul Child Christmas Time
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A late-1960s Santa Monica scene in which the Santa Ana winds clear the smog to reveal a soul child wandering through the Christmas marketplace, ultimately finding sparse shelter with a reluctant father figure in a cracked brown building where leather beads make music bleed.
Set in 'A Late Sixties Santa Monica' where 'the Santa Ana wind sweep cleared the smog' and 'it seemed to rain for forty days and forty nights,' the poem follows a 'soul child' who 'walks head low / waiting for the storm to blow' while 'the modern day city king came back from Japan' in 'a gold suit' on television. The soul child is the one who sees through the 'marble facade' and 'the charade' of the marketplace Mall: 'All that moves and equals / is known by the soul child.' The turn comes when 'the uptown dressed man' is 'approached by a soul child' and gives 'as a father' but 'ungladly,' her appearance answering 'his domestic questions' - reluctance, not refusal, enough to carry them across a threshold into 'a cracked brown building' where 'leather hung-strung beads make music bleed' and 'not an objective stranger makes witness by this deed.'