Untitled ("I hear chimes on the porches")
By Jack Joseph Smith
I hear chimes on the porches
that are three hundred years old
I hear the mother's pray
for their trained killers
to come home
The secret is taking us
to the last place
we can find
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
GPT
A brief haunting piece where domestic sound, inherited prayer, and war collapse into the same old porch air.
Claude
Porch chimes carry three histories: domestic comfort, inherited prayer, and the wars that took people away from those porches. The poem hears accumulated absence in a single sound.
The brevity matches the sound described — chimes are brief, intermittent, and the poem gives them just enough space to ring before falling silent.