By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A compact statement about communal identity, struggle, and luck, where spiritual language and violence are inseparable.
A compact creed reported at second hand: the husband says 'the Native / American' gives 'us our spirit / to fight', while 'Ehr Shaman says no to / our ways' yet grants the tribes 'no seperation with wright and wrong'. The argument is that fusion into one tribe is how 'we win', and the poem closes on the bitter shrug that 'the world will loose' and that the 'greatness of warrows / would translate such good luck' into 'such / a shame'.
As the collection's first poem this sets the terms: identity arrives quoted, filtered through 'My husband says' and 'they say', a borrowed conviction the speaker transmits more than owns. The genuinely strange move is the collapse of moral categories - the shaman who refuses 'our ways' is the same authority that erases the line between right and wrong, so winning requires giving up the very 'seperation' that would let you judge the cost. The final turn sours the triumph: the talk is all of victory ('that is how we win'), but the verdict is loss and shame. The misspellings - 'wright', 'loose', 'warrows' - keep the creed in a spoken, unpolished register, a fighting faith repeated rather than examined.