Page 94

By Jack Joseph Smith

Intentional celestial destruction Fore-stands chance behind the umifornity of vivid bombs unleashing the chemical blaze. of good=by charred humanity ‘ Against the sky smeared canvas of bloody beauty thet makes Raphael'at lest abstract The pre-analytical dawn shimmering the derlmess of a kind of color 2ilm concept free from plastics IS FIRST past-visionary sights - warriors go blind from I can not remember- leva: And war-I have only-kmown one to ons But battle lose the duelity I will “not OP how intensely-insane is slaughter: MamrPactured to drop on the objectivity of a dot

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem offers a jagged anti-war vision in which bomb light becomes a terrible aesthetic spectacle that strips both people and perception bare.

Even in fragments, the central contrast is clear: vivid chemical blaze and "bloody beauty" are set against charred humanity, so war is shown as visually seductive and morally obscene at the same time. The reference to Raphael becoming abstract suggests that slaughter scrambles older forms of order and beauty. Its broken syntax helps rather than hurts, because the language itself seems blasted apart by what it is trying to witness.

Claude

'Intentional celestial destruction': bomb-blaze against a sky canvas that 'makes Raphael at last abstract', the speaker refusing war's duality.

The poem reads the mushroom cloud as an art-historical event — it pushes Raphael forward into abstraction because representation can no longer keep up. 'I can not remember Iwo' is the personal concession that keeps the page from pure polemic. The 'manufactured to drop on the objectivity of a dot' is the poem's cold-eyed description of targeting.