Easter and Time
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Film brings historical figures briefly close before the poem turns to companionship with Christ's eternal body and Easter's repeated renewal. The ending compares thunder to sweetness for those who know drought and famine.
Garden, Donkey, Supper, Cross and Tomb make the meditation physical. The last scan also has a handwritten family dedication; its stable rows are retained, but an uncertain name row is omitted and does not determine the poem's meaning.
The poem names people 'who embody time', from Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence to Martin Luther King, touched again by 'Viewing film', and turns to Easter, when Christ 're=enters ever new worlds' along the path 'From the Garden to the Donkey / To a Supper, a Cross and a Tomb'. It ends that those who know 'drought and famine / Know as the sweetness / of thunder'.
Film and Easter are both presented as ways of return, and the Passion is traced in a plain, almost catechism-like list. The thunder image turns threat into relief. A handwritten family dedication follows the poem, with one name row left unread.