Being Angry Is Believing The Anger
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker warns against attacking creators, prayer and workers, then recalls dynamite and ten thousand trees in terror.
The speaker gives each command a reason in an indented line. The memory of dynamite leaves self-defense entangled with fear and tests the title's claim that anger involves believing in what one opposes.
Under a title continued in its first line, 'YOU ARE ANGRY WITH', the poem gives commandment-like warnings with reasons: 'Tamper not with the one who creates / for creation is the symbol of change', 'The murder of time is the suicide of thyself / for mankind is time', 'Take not the worker's life / for what he does he many times knows not of'. It ends 'But self defense is a serious moving fear / for once through the dynamite / I saw some ten thousand trees in terror'.
The indented 'for' lines make each warning an argument, and the last triplet breaks the calm with a personal memory of an explosion that the poem does not classify as defense or attack. The title's claim that anger believes in what it opposes is left to stand against that image.