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By Jack Joseph Smith

Time, you have no right to my memory Dare wind dare Call when my hand is over my cheek Resting my ear From the silence So loud Before and after the now Dare wind dare Resemble my agony when you think me weakened At the sight of your voices Over shambles behind and longing beyond But an ash dropping slowly In the late night with barely a dimness above Dare wind dare Plead that it is you I seek When spirit has gone away And this breeze does not touch my spine With shivers of saintly darkness In spiritual sacrifice beneath Dare wind dare Flutter me away to the floor of the deep In a moment I am falling to Twisted in fear of ghost beams Moving along the crack of a frozen door Where lies the shadowed ice of terrible sin. Burning between us

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

An address to time and wind becomes a struggle against memory, spiritual abandonment, and the fear of being pulled into cold, sinful depths.

The repeated dare wind dare sounds defiant, but it also admits how vulnerable the speaker is to voices, shambles behind, and longing beyond. Silence is paradoxically loud, so the atmosphere presses on the body through cheek, ear, spine, ash, and frozen door. What burns between us is never named directly, which makes the closing sense of separation and guilt feel sharper.


Claude

An incantatory night address that opens 'Time, you have no right to my / memory' and turns on the refrain 'Dare wind dare', daring the wind to 'Resemble my agony', to 'Plead that it is you I seek / When spirit has gone away', and finally to 'Flutter me away to the floor of the deep', closing on 'Burning between us'.

The poem first wrests memory from time, then converts the wind into a presence it can taunt and confront, the fourfold 'Dare wind dare' working as a breath-setter so that the stanza gaps are where the speaker inhales. The body anchors the abstraction throughout - hand 'over my cheek', ear 'Resting / From the silence / So loud', breeze that 'does not touch my spine / With shivers of saintly darkness'. The defiance is also confession of vulnerability, since the wind is dared precisely because it threatens to drag him 'Twisted in fear of ghost beams' toward 'the shadowed ice of terrible sin'. The unnamed thing 'Burning between us' lets the whole apostrophe read as a half-erotic address to weather and absence at once, sharpened by never being identified. The line-break of the title across 'my / memory' and the de-blanked stanza spacing are kept as the scan shows them.