Page 20
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker makes understanding the Earth a condition for feeling or reaching Heaven, considers peace and violence and ends with animals and humans believing they are going someplace.
The speaker asks how anyone can claim to know a destination while struggling to understand the Earth. The poem places peace and violence beside that question without offering a political program or a confirmed afterlife.
'Journey' says you cannot 'go to Heaven / Until the impossible / is done / Which is to understand / the Earth', that 'Peace and violence / Not too different', and ends with a handwritten close: animals and people 'actually believe / ThAt thEy ArE goiNg / somEpLACE'.
The poem treats belief in progress with dry skepticism; the closing rows are handwritten and their case is provisional.