By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Terror is arranged like a ceremonial gift, exposing how violence, religion, and public display feed one another in the language of conflict.
The opening turns bomb imagery into roses and bouquet, making menace look tasteful and deliberate rather than chaotic. That contrast continues with the funeral home named "Lovely Mirror," where death becomes branding and reflection. The references to British battle, media religion, and trade suggest a conflict sustained as much by spectacle and identity as by direct force.
'I.R.A. ATHEIST': 'I will but wrinkle one flower bud / As I hand the man these dozen roses of / (fuse and fire)' 'In a nice bouquet of terror', and lets the funeral home '(be named)' 'Lovely Mirror', amid an 'untasteful / British bettle' of 'media religion' on 'the London pound'.
The poem arranges violence as etiquette - the bomb is roses, the terror a bouquet, the only damage a 'wrinkle' to one bud - and the parenthetical '(fuse and fire)' lets the menace surface inside the courtesy. The funeral home christened 'Lovely Mirror' is the heaviest stroke: the act is named for the reflection it offers rather than the bodies it makes, branding death as self-regard. The close drags in 'British bettle', 'media religion', and the conversion of 'primitive agnostic: trade' 'into Catholic Millworker silver', locating the conflict in economy and identity as much as in force. The source spelling 'bettle' is preserved as written.