Silence

By Jack Joseph Smith

Kids want to get under your skin They are growing up any way, they can Placid is a lake not a mind Before the child prepare for the child After all,, it is better to say, latter. yes, I was a child; to remember it with anguish,, or whatever it takes,, to be a child no longer Cross me now outside myself; the beauty I have written Like a sand bag against an overflow,, many times a child is thrown there The tool and dye of function for a poet Toward the end my children have provided me that So know my material life can stay with me in the wind ever after So now this silence is all of the silence I will ever know

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about childhood and aftermath, turning silence into something accumulated, endured, and finally possessed.

Claude

Kids growing up 'any way they can' is the poem's central fact — survival is improvisational, and silence is what accumulates around the improvisations that fail. The poem treats silence not as absence of sound but as a substance that builds up over a childhood like sediment.

The desire to 'get under your skin' suggests that children's noise and need are themselves forms of penetration, and silence is what remains after the skin has been gotten under and the getting has stopped.