Just Our Nature

By Jack Joseph Smith

Skies back like Nothern California, or rather like Mohawk Suddenly each season turns, with short and long shade, a feeling sensory to thought The unclocked orange above us is gone The waiting for years for one star is over Secrets and seconds mean something through the trees, our view of wild animals, folage and gardens, of our own, to watch the dance of muskrat and deer, between city and suburb cocky with their pitence Western Pennsylvania keeping coal on the river is yes But there is no sight of plastic and tin cans, going down with the golden leaves this fall We are the ones who know there is unlikelyness, in a cure from the million crosses we have put up, still we accept that type of critism as a way of life Make it a shock for a world, a country in horror; it is politics, that has finely let us see the stars, announced our lonely and courting dreams, over the legacy of our city Shut down towns, visual as if whiped by war; big steel ripping livelyhood away with an arm meaner than adjunk The peacemaker testing three rivers and a thousand more, with University tubes carefully through each inch, of the water, to stop chemical, computer or otherwise, from coming next

AI Interpretation

GPT

A regional poem that sees nature, industry, and politics as one shared system, with beauty always shadowed by extraction and civic damage.


Claude

Northern California skies transplanted to Mohawk country — the poem immediately establishes that landscape is comparative, that one place always recalls another. Nature here is not pristine but systemic: seasons turn, shade changes, industry and politics operate within the same ecology that produces beauty.

The title's 'just' does double work — it means both 'merely' and 'righteous.' Our nature is just our nature (nothing more) and also just our nature (morally loaded), and the poem inhabits both meanings without choosing.