Page 88
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Gun ships, fortifacations, spectacle, and an enduring feminine figure are set against one another until history looks like entertainment built on theft that still cannot finish her.
The poem is scathing about the modern pleasure of watching violence, insisting that what looks breathless and new is only newly visible. Against that, she appears as something older than war's display, carried from dust and sacred story through repeated acts of elevation and stripping. The final claim that she is not done yet gives the whole piece its counterforce.
This untitled piece indicts spectacle: oceans of 'gun ships' and 'fortifacations' full of 'impodent killers' are damning not because they are new but because 'we all get to watch it now, / it is so entertaining, breathless.' Against that televised violence it sets an ancient feminine figure who 'dreame d into the dust, before the / Son of God', whose 'immagination' men built into 'castles' so they could set her 'on / top while they took all her sisters.' The close turns intimate and prophetic - she would 'turn my head' on the street - and insists 'she comes from the beginning / to where we are, and she is not done yet.'