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By Jack Joseph Smith

A Poet's Problem For a man of the sea landlocked children swim By him-no guilt gushes, rather humor waves-a tight blush Sorry to have let you stay on the sand But God what the rivers too have done turning my back to thee In time Pacific children coming women Water will calm us in eye to eye peace Yet -it is not a wish, wishes being too light. For it is the heavy storm to surfaced minds we must use to find each other in the right. My children are many as the beads in lace Yet though rivers and winds and seas are fact. I pray love will never be dissected as disgrace. When I only ment that my being be buried abstract.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem speaks from separation toward reunion, using sea, river, storm, and prayer to imagine a love that can survive distance without being reduced or shamed.

A landlocked man of the sea is already a divided figure, and that tension drives the whole piece. Children, women, rivers, and winds broaden the address beyond one private relationship, but the aim remains intimate: to meet rightly, eye to eye, through heavy weather rather than wishful softness. The closing prayer resists analysis that would turn love into disgrace, and asks instead for a burial that keeps being abstract and undiminished.

Claude

'A Poet's Problem': landlocked children swimming past a man of the sea, a prayer that love not be dissected as disgrace.

The poem makes the poet a local anachronism — his scale doesn't match the scale of where he ended up. 'My children are many as the beads in lace' reroutes the inheritance worry onto craft. The closing plea — 'that my being be buried abstract' — asks for a legacy that won't be anatomized, which is what the speaker fears for his own love poems.