The Old Way

By Jack Joseph Smith

There I saw Geronimo save me from the fire When I was a child picking up a totem pole Over and down in Apache territory tem tops the sand Waist nothing when you stand across the sand Says Che
waist nothing when you stand across this sand waist noting when you see all is so lush waist noting when you see across the concrete waist noting when ocean's wild and flapping the jig Happy now we are saved not lost And a penny saved is a penny earned
Ten years old tops Over and down in Apache territory There I saw Geronimo save me from the fire When I was a child picking up a totem pole Waist nothing of your thought Che on the cliff The sand and the lushness The concrete and the sloneness Are so flapping and wild A body jib to swirl and turn out in measure Never saved always lost with youth A penny earned is a very long dream Is there romantic and depossed is true I live in a city were there still are a few stepping stones and all the way from the country how good those streets are for the heart

Original Scan

Page 15
Page 16
Page 17

AI Interpretation

GPT

This three-page sequence mixes Apache landscape, Geronimo memory, childhood vision, and urban afterlife into a rough meditation on what survives and what is lost.

Even with fragmentary wording, the through-line is strong: sand, cliff, lushness, concrete, youth, and city streets all belong to one argument about inheritance. The poem keeps testing whether an older frontier or spiritual intensity can still be felt inside modern life, and the answer is unstable but not empty.

Claude

Three drafts of the same poem laid out as one work. Page 15 is the seed — Geronimo, the totem pole, Apache territory, Che. Page 16 is the chant, four 'waist nothing / waist noting' verses that work less as statement than as rhythm, closing on the inherited proverb 'a penny saved is a penny earned.' Page 17 is the finished piece, where the chant is compressed and the poem finally arrives at 'I live in a city were there still / are a few stepping stones.' Read across the pagebreaks, it is a poem about how much of your childhood survives the crossing into a concrete city, and the answer — a few stones, a penny earned, a body jib 'to swirl and turn out in measure' — is small but intact.