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By Jack Joseph Smith

Just Our Nature 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

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

This page turns Western Pennsylvania landscape into a meditation on damage, memory, and local endurance.

The poem sees nature and industry together rather than apart. Rivers, coal, deer, gardens, and shut-down towns all belong to the same wounded place.


Claude

The opening poem, Just Our Nature, sets the book in western Pennsylvania. Muskrat and deer dance between city and suburb, coal still rides the river but plastic and tin are not going down with the golden leaves, and the peacemaker tests three rivers with University tubes against chemical and computer intrusion. Place-based politics as civic piety.