Untitled ("It is the coal mine, actually, you say")

By Jack Joseph Smith

It is the coal mine, actually, you say give me two wekks just to say I've done it; questions are silly about hard life We in the pural know the answer to death The meaning,, let us talk geology, the old is where we are from When the shafts blew up and blew down My greatgrand parents said oh well Civil war, Mexican ar First world war Everybody her still remembers them well We started judging ourselves a long time ago The tempting is in a flower

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A mining-country poem that treats history, geology, and inherited judgment as one long education in survival.

Claude

The deference to another voice ('you say') is unusual in a collection of first-person assertion. Here the speaker listens before speaking, and the mine commands that respect — geology teaches history, judgment, and survival simultaneously.

The correction 'actually' acknowledges that someone else has named the subject, giving the coal mine authority over even this defiant voice.