By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page ties domestic labor and animal care to anger, exhaustion, and the lonely repetition of checking on children after dark.
The voice is blunt and unprotected. Milking, sunset, the fence, the house shack, and midnight all stay rooted in work and routine, but the emotional charge comes from how that routine has hardened into resentment and fatigue.
Absence and labor braided together: 'I don't feel him / when I milk our oily / holstien, you rotten / bastards'. The curse aimed outward sits inside ordinary chores, and the poem keeps time by vigilance - 'I was the eleventh Time / I had lifted my eyes / Counting checking the kids / in the farm house shack' - so the act of looking up becomes the clock that 'means Midnight'. Source spelling 'holstien' is preserved as written.