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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"The Call" binds failed devotion, administrative greed, and the trade in drugs and guns into one field where calling out evil risks being answered by the same evil.
Going and staying are presented as equally compromised, so the poem's real subject is not decision but entrapment. The line about loving Jesus "that way" suggests a wound caused by obedience, charisma, or religious overreach rather than simple belief. Money, weapons, and moral theater blur together until the speaker arrives at a terrible rule: in a corrupt order, one is pushed to become even worse just to survive it.
This first 'The Call' draft watches a vocation curdle: 'after Africa she is sick,' and the would-be priest who assumed 'they will listen to everything / I say' instead 'got hurt loving Jesus that way.' The administrator sees only 'the money on its way,' the call reduced to 'sheet music, / with no one to play,' and 'A dime crossed the earth / And silence came back' before the poem hardens into market logic - 'buy and buy, / drugs and guns, better be more evil, / tham they.'