By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem stages a grim street scene where ordinary work, police violence, and moral degradation collapse into one another.
Coins, parking, and an alley begin in plain urban routine, then the sound of violence shatters that everyday frame. Calling the witness a Hyena too suggests that survival in such a scene can itself become degrading, even before any action is taken. The final image of the bleeding policeman and the assailants' cold distain leaves behind a city where brutality has become almost procedural.
Titled 'HOW LOW IS RENAISSANCE', a man whose 'work is in coins' parks near an alley where a cop is being beaten, decides he 'can't do anything with him / but be a Hyena too', gets 'down / By the wall' and joins in with a shouted 'A-ye-ea!', then the 'assailants miraculously / conceived of the citizen in cold distain / and left'.
The title states the thesis and the body proves it: a renaissance degraded to a man choosing to become a 'Hyena too' rather than intervene, his ordinary errand in 'coins' giving way to pack violence the moment 'bad sound' starts. The shouted 'A-ye-ea!' is the page's most damning detail, a wordless cry that marks his crossing from witness to participant. The hinge is 'miraculously': the attackers stop not from mercy but because they regard the bleeding cop 'in cold distain' and simply lose interest, so survival here is moral accident, not rescue. That the policeman is left 'breathing / wild enough to help' withholds any clean ending. Source spelling 'distain' is kept as written.