By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Poetry, rough life, beauty, hurt, and continental scale are compressed into a bruised homecoming lyric.
The page keeps swinging between tenderness and swagger. Its claim is not that poetry surpasses experience, but that beauty, injury, and distance all have to be lived more than once before they can be spoken.
A bruised homecoming lyric under the title 'A'hieuga'. It swings between swagger and tenderness - 'Oh how sweet the poetry / Not better than the rough life', 'A women just as pretty / And you got to do it all twice' - then lands on arrival, 'I guess I am first time home with a heart', the speaker's shadow spreading 'up street of town' while 'across my Pacific and North America; nothing is wrong'. The repeated doing-it-twice and the continental shadow make peace feel hard-won rather than given.