Page 9
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This handwritten page treats war as a faith object rather than a child, then refuses to let death remain the center of everything afterward.
The corrected dash and signature punctuation keep the page's note-like intimacy intact. Its bluntness is personal rather than abstract: the closing `Your friend, Jack` makes the antiwar declaration feel addressed.
A short creed framed as correspondence: 'War is not a child / War is God if you / happen to believe / in that one.' With 'frantic / names passed down,' the poem insists that 'All wanders Afterwards / have had nothing to do / with death,' separating survivors' drifting from the dead they carry. The closing 'Your friend, / Jack' turns the meditation into a signed letter, one of the rare points where the author's own name enters the book.