By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Borrowing the Hindu stages of life, the poem frames error, damage, endurance, and departure as part of a reluctant spiritual passage rather than a clean escape.
The poem moves from a life-stage framework into a harsher story of harm and survival. The handwritten ending makes the abstraction personal: what remains strange is how one another can simply get up and leave.
'Wishing Short' opens with the four Hindu stages - 'work and family, / preperation and leaving; Sanyasam' - then drops that frame for a bitter domestic story: 'She went out their and got life,' 'She got lucky with her strife,' against a 'his intention' that was 'To rip her intire being / To bits.' The middle softens into a tender image of two leaves that 'touch / Silent as a sheave,' insisting 'Danger and gentle' are 'not lost / At all cost' and 'We do not leave.' The handwritten last lines undercut that vow with rueful wonder: 'isn't it strange / How one another just up and left.' Source spellings 'preperation,' 'their,' and 'intire' are preserved.