GPT
A poem about corrupted vocation, in which religion, money, violence, and public speech all collapse into one compromised system.
Claude
'The Call' interrogates vocation as something already curdled into appetite. A woman for whom 'There didn't seem to be any differance / Between going and staying' comes back from Africa 'sick'; a man drawn to the priesthood for the wrong reason - 'they will listen to everything I say' - is told flatly 'you can't / love Jesus that way'. An administrator sees money 'on it's possibilities, / Like sheet music with no one to play', and the poem ends on a corrosive logic - 'If it is evil enough, by the sword, / buy, buy the drugs / better to be more evil than they'.
The title names a religious summons, but every figure here mishears it as a license for self-extension. The woman cannot tell departure from staying, which empties her movement of any calling; the would-be priest wants an audience, not a God, and the poem's rebuke - 'you can't / love Jesus that way' - is the moral hinge of the piece. Money enters as silent potential, 'sheet music with no one to play', a phrase that turns capital into an unplayed score and the administrator into a man hearing music no one performs. The close is deliberately ugly: 'Call them out, and see if they call you' dares the corrupt to answer, and the pun on 'by the sword, / buy, buy the drugs' fuses violence and commerce into a single transaction whose conclusion - 'better to be more evil than they' - is escalation, not redemption. Inside a collection that travels 'From Sinatra to Christ', this is the call heard wrong, the sacred vocation read back as power, audience, and money.