Page 295
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Sue is praised as one of the rare people whose art and way of seeing began at birth, making her quick certainty feel earned.
The poem treats Sue's sensibility as native rather than acquired, something present from the start in both craft and perception. Mom's resistance to change becomes a foil, suggesting that ordinary caution cannot recognize what Sue knows. The final claim that Sue is right is simple on purpose, as though speed of understanding can itself be a moral fact.
A portrait poem that calls Sue 'one of those selected' and dates her art and 'way of viewing life' all the way back to 'birth,' as if her sensibility were innate rather than learned. Mom's flat conviction that 'change? / is wrong' is set against the speaker's faster creed: for 'the very few' who share Sue's gift, getting 'from one place to the other' quickly is its own proof, so the bare verdict 'Sue is right' needs no argument.