By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Lauren begins by listing who needs help in war, travel, healing, and contemplation, then lifts love above all such support as a force complete in itself.
The catalogue starts in common human vulnerability: soldiers, travelers, healers, and solitary discoverers all require aid or backup. Even the person who sits still and finds wildness is not left alone but served with a cup, a small image of care that keeps the poem domestic. Against all that need, love arrives as the one condition that asks for nothing outside itself.
'Lauren' (short): those who go to war, travel, heal, and sit and discover the wildness all need help or a cup brought to them; those who hold 'the best of the beginning and the ending — Love — don't any help at all.'