By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A farm poem spoken at the edge of grief, where rough domestic detail and childlike vulnerability meet without resolving each other.
Beginning with foreknowledge of finality - 'Seeing there was an end / He would be listening / to bad language' - the poem sets two quoted laments, 'It breaks my heart' and 'It crushes my soul', against the steady physical world of a farm: firm fences, corners, 'meetings in the barn', firewood 'sometimes soft, / and sometimes wild'. It closes on children whose seasons are rougher than their stones, a clipped invocation 'Redd, rock, and heck with alone', and a near-prayer: 'Spire thy mystery unto me'.
The poem's quiet drama is that its only direct speech is borrowed grief - the quotation marks around 'It breaks my heart' and 'It crushes my soul' make these the cliches a listener overhears at an ending, lines so worn they have become the available language for loss. Against this the farm holds its solidity ('The fences are firm along the farm'), and the comparison 'seasons are not as smooth, / for children, / as are their stones' is the work's hardest insight: weather and time bruise the young more than the inert objects they play with. The closing 'Spire thy mystery unto me' lifts the diction abruptly toward the King James register - 'spire' working as both a verb of aspiration and an echo of inspire - so a plain farm elegy ends reaching for revelation. The truncated 'Redd, rock, and heck with alone' reads as a loose litany of refusals against solitude; this reading treats it as deliberately clipped source phrasing, and preserves 'Redd' and the source punctuation as written.