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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Christ becoming Jesus is imagined as a refusal of falseness, offered only because human beings could see it too, even while wanting to shed themselves.
The change from Christ to Jesus feels less theological than experiential, as if a figure became real by refusing to be phony, false, or merely symbolic. The poem trusts vision only because Jesus trusted others could witness what he saw for themselves. "We want to get rid of us" gives the piece its bleak force, making self-erasure sound like a common human urge against which simple walking becomes a moral act.
When Christ became Jesus he wouldn't have told us what he saw without believing we could see it ourselves. He refused to be phony or false about coming from something else. 'We want to get rid of us' — maybe Jesus is busy, but he walked.