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

AI Interpretation

GPT

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

Claude

A bitter, self-lacerating inventory of fatherhood that opens 'You were no good to start with' and proceeds to itemize the unglamorous labor: diapers 'cloth of many too,' the long catalog of 'footballs, the basketballs, the baseball balls, / the socker balls,' the 'very bad mitten,' 'C,C,D,, bible studies.' The accounting curdles into a confession - 'I had a can of beer in my hand however' - and ends at a roadside that has changed hands: 'It's a flower shop now.'

The crushing move is that the abusive opening 'you' turns out to be aimed at the speaker himself, the parent who did the work while drinking through it. The sports list runs so long it becomes its own kind of penance, a man reciting every ball he ever bought as if quantity could stand in for presence. The hard pivot - 'I hope you had hunting and fishing ... I didn't' - separates the imagined good childhood from the speaker's failure to give it. The final benediction, 'Good luck farm guys, / maybe you got something, / that will remember you,' is wistful and defeated at once: the gas station is gone, the children grown, and all that may survive is a faint chance of being remembered.