By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The child is imagined through sound, sin, weapons, sea, moon, stars, and reverence, caught between earth and sky under the pressure of absolute truthfulness.
This page keeps innocence and danger in the same frame. Gun, horse, rope, sea, poles, stars, moon, and genuflection all gather around the child, so that reverence itself feels bodily and unstable. The ending refuses comfort: looking the kid in the eye means telling no lie, not even one.
'The Child' runs on tight rhyming couplets that keep innocence and danger in one frame: 'How you sound, / when you talk / How you sin, / when you walk,' then 'With a gun in your hand,' 'a horse and a rope,' 'the sea, / and without a boat.' The crowded handwritten middle - 'two poles, MADE All of stars / MOON' and the repeated 'GENUFLECTING' - makes reverence bodily and unstable, hands that 'know Little about' it. Caught 'between the earth, / and the sky,' the poem ends as an oath sworn 'Looking the kid in the eye': 'NO lie,, no lie , not / one.' This page is a reviewed but mixed-band transcript with crowded handwriting, so the exact middle wording stays slightly provisional.