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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem argues that harming creators, believers, workers, or time itself is a form of self-destruction, then grounds that warning in a vision of shared terror.
Each command works like a blunt moral law: creation means change, prayer means loss, man is time, and the worker acts without full understanding. The language is rough and imperfect, but the logic is consistent in treating violence as something that rebounds on the one who commits it. The final image of thousands of terrified trees widens the argument beyond human conflict, making fear feel ecological and universal rather than merely personal.
'Being Angry Is Believing The Anger': don't touch the man who creates or prays, kill not the worker, self defense is a very serious fear.
The poem uses a commandment-form to deliver a small social ethics. The key line is the last — self defense as a serious fear, justified because the speaker once saw 'thousands of trees in terror'. That concrete horror image saves the page from pure precept. The commandments are each paired with a 'for' clause that argues rather than asserts.