By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Later reflection turns gift against giver, keeps three loves and war in the same silence, and admits that no useful thought came on the mountain.
The poem looks backward from afterlife talk toward the moment when good times had to be suspended and difficulty finally faced. A gift that turns on its receiver makes blessing feel unstable, almost predatory. "Three loves" and "the way of war" stand beside each other without reconciliation, and the mountain top offers no revelation, only blankness.
A backward-looking reckoning that opens with the stalled, overtyped 'I didn't tha / I didn't thinkof it until later on,' the false start left in as evidence. It catalogs what gets discussed posthumously - 'Sorrow and sin and the less of us' - and urges suspending the good times to 'think about how hard it really was.' The central anxiety is a blessing gone predatory: 'If you are given a gift / Then the gift turns on you / Then what do you do?' Held together by 'Three loves you wont let go' and 'The way of war that wont let you alone,' the poem collapses into 'It is all silene,' admitting that even 'on top a mountain top' no 'thoughtful thing' arrived. Source spellings 'thinkof,' 'whan,' 'wont,' and 'silene' are preserved.