Children Raised

By Jack Joseph Smith

You were no good to start with The only reason you ever stood up for yourself, is because of assholes that said they were better You changed the diapers, cloth of many too Put them on your shoulders, all the time, and seasons never changed no matter where you were Had the footballs, the basketballs, the baseball balls, the socker balls, the bats from the third from the former, the corcaee hoops first than balls in you will, the tennis rackets and balls again, the very bad mitten, with a loss yo pool and ping pong due to a working cellar Who cared? How about C,C,D,, bible studies, call it what you like I hope you had hunting and fishing I hope you had skinning and milking I didn't: I had a can of beer in my hand however Always at the gas station It's a flower shop now Good luck farm guys, maybe you got something, that will remember you

Original Scan

Page 46

AI Interpretation

GPT

A bitter family and class poem that counts the labor of raising children against piety, sports culture, and rural forgetting.

Claude

The poem begins with accusation ('You were no good to start with') and never softens. Raising children is measured against piety, sports culture, and the rural forgetting that lets damage go unexamined. The bitterness is not performative — it is the residue of having counted the cost and found the ledger permanently unbalanced.

The second-person address creates an uncomfortable intimacy: the 'you' could be the speaker addressing himself, a parent, or a community. That ambiguity is the poem's method — blame circulates without landing on a single target.