By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Against reactionary hunger for endings, the poem argues that weakness belongs to human character and that danger keeps testing itself through history's hunters.
The poem refuses the fantasy that one decisive person could make life go unnoticed or make danger disappear. Weakness is called fundamental, which makes reaction less like a political label than a recurring human habit. Fire and brimstone are treated as crude simplifications, while the final hunters place the appetite for endings deep in human history.
A meditation against the fantasy that one person could erase danger: 'We don(t want to imagine / That because of one person / Life is unnoticed'. It calls 'Weakness... fundimatal / in the character of man' and names that recurrence 'what reactionary / is', since 'The danger just tests itself / Like hippy, / where you are at'. It dismisses apocalyptic appetite -- 'I think it is fire and brimstone / I know they are all wrong / They all want it to come / to an end' -- placing that hunger deep in history, in 'Those across the Earth / Who went hunting from the beginnong'.