Page 112
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Mockery of labor gives way to a rough defense of work as inherited force, with steel-mill sparks and timber-camp chains turning a self-called fool into someone briefly standing in for giants.
The page begins from humiliation, bad tools, bad judgment, and a bridge not tied off, but it refuses to leave the speaker there. Sparks in the mill become peoples souls, turning industrial work into something sacred and collective rather than merely exhausting. The corrected timber-camp line and final movie-star comparison make the ending feel corrective: measured against real labor, a life may have carried more weight than it first appeared to.
Continuing from the prior page, this untitled piece defends labor against mockery: 'When they make fun of work / You have know idea / about where it began.' The speaker accepts humiliation ('I am wrong; the hammer was to long', 'I am a fooll,, the bridge / had not tie off') yet sacralizes the work itself - 'sparts in steel mills / were peoples souls.' Imagining himself 'stepping in for giants', 'pulling green chain in the old timber camps', he arrives, against the glamour of 'all these movie stars', at the consoling verdict that 'Yourlife was not so useless after all.'