Page 58

By Jack Joseph Smith

over the land that would always belong to a man who never knew me. I stoped building fires when they started building homes on the hill. No more fire trucks and firemen in dress parade along the hill where a spirit used to be

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This fragment treats development on the hill as the end of an older fire-lit world and the spirit that once lived there.

Even in its brevity, the page contrasts building homes with losing a ritual landscape. The disappearance of fire trucks and parade makes progress feel like a kind of erasure.

Claude

A nearly-empty page that functions as a closing stanza: the land that would always belong to a man who never knew me, and the end of the fires when real-estate development arrives on the hill.