Page 19

By Jack Joseph Smith

Greatgrandpa told them to leave those up streams alone down here in the coal anthracite town, and I said I am afraid of that ravene, and when our favorite mule went down I screemed harder than heaven at it's stark blue eyes sancken in the mud as wach withh the boards of pine and willow scrub and there I saw the sorrow swell as the waves shot through the levlys; it was when the reeds turned up like thousands of excaped convicts swallowed for the last time, and I loved the gester you would make about finding me no matter how lost I got, and now I can not, will not find you, yey are you not something you never thought of, a piece, not a speck, an eye of beauty when your fight is gone. Anthracite

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Grandfather's warning about the streams opens into a coal-town elegy of ravines, levees, a drowning mule, and the unbearable knowledge that the beloved can no longer be found.

The poem is full of collapse: animals sink, reeds rise like convicts, and grief swells as if the whole watershed has become a body in distress. Family speech still tries to impose order, but the town's sorrow keeps overwhelming instruction. The handwritten Anthracite tag grounds the page in coal-country memory, while the closing image of beauty appearing only after the fight is gone makes peace feel inseparable from disappearance.

Claude

The Greatgrandpa / anthracite passage, the mule going down, reeds like thousands of excaped convicts swallowed for the last time. The you'' gester, idiosyncratically spelled, is the part the speaker cannot find again.