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By Jack Joseph Smith

the petal has no seed I'saw a petal fall. I did it for thee- A petal fall And you, .you were; in.time with season. I then saw a World of petals falling Without confusing rhyme with reason Surrounding the orchard ground From the high branching cirelé,. of each fruit treed skys. they liked ite <c' About all‘ their pink and white moisture, . Was a moving downs : Now you may laugh less :of a lover: I suddenly did not discover because-of literature Olinging-round about the seconds of touch. In and out and too to one another Their excitement was even: enough, to-let: one's breath be but sound Yet thought to wonder is fastest. When one watches. the self,. run up to step down TIME as music works out a leasure-and wins” While. what is incredably hard; is called floating when it is won. To disappear-like the-light that is chased’ without the slightest form of a figuresce Bécomes: “life-is sweet® 'Become- *nind at large® Let'us become quiet during the days after the blossoms - of late summer flowers: that tilt towardees’ the- petals :of every past With the trees gift back to Earth, a body abstract to a sucken skys may bend back with their tight. twigs: Our nothing that. lasts that does: Ae -it remains: the place-that:. will always. exist. between what amounts: to seperation

Original Scan

Page 102

AI Interpretation

GPT

Falling blossom petals become a meditation on love, season, and the strange effort of letting the self dissolve into time.

The speaker starts from the simple sight of a petal falling and keeps widening outward until the whole orchard seems to move in a single moist drift. Love is present, but not as a tidy literary idea; it is tied to touch, breath, music, and the hard-won feeling of floating. The closing turn toward quiet after the blossoms gives the poem a calm, almost stripped-down acceptance of separation, as if what lasts is not possession but the place where things return.

Claude

Second recension of 'The Petal Has No Seed': small reshufflings, the late-summer flowers explicitly invited to become quiet.

The second pass softens the ending by introducing 'let us become quiet' as an explicit invitation rather than implied. The poem is more at peace with its own central image. The petal that falls is now doing so with a companion voice.