By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Prayer becomes a surrender into song, wind, water seen from the other side, and a final claim that nature and God want the opposite of what one thinks.
This revision keeps the earlier blessing-and-hell contradiction but adds handwritten pressure around the water: it is not just passing through, but seen from the other side before it has gone through the speaker. The lower insertion turns the ending into a self-address, as if one's best chance after all is bound up with nature and God precisely because they reverse expectation.
This revision of 'Prayer' keeps the blessing-and-hell paradox -- now 'the blessing / of the spirit' that 'is sometimes / the hell of the Holy Ghost' -- and the same surrender, 'Relinquish all you have / Bury stuff.' The water gains a prior witness: it 'has seen the / other side' before it 'has gone through you.' The added coda turns outward into bleak counsel: 'After All / nature and God / Are what they want / The oppisite of what you think.'