Time, You Have No Right

By Jack Joseph Smith

Time, you have no right to my memory- Dare wind dare Call when my hand is over my cheek Resting my ear From the silence So loud Before and after the now Dare wind dare Resemble my agony when you think me weakened At the sight of your voices Over shambles behind and longing beyond But an ash dropping slowly In the late night with barely a dimness above Dare wind dare Plead that it is you I seek When spirit has gone away And this breeze does not touch my spine With shivers of saintly darkness In spiritual sacrifice beneath Dare wind dare Flutter me away to the floor of the deep In a moment I am falling to Twisted in fear of ghost beams Moving along the crack of a frozen door Where lies the shadowed ice of terrible sin Burning between us

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A defiant incantation against time's claim on memory, where wind, darkness, spiritual sacrifice, and ghostly imagery weave together a speaker falling through fear toward frozen, sinful depths.

Claude

'Time, You Have No Right' is a short incantatory lyric organized by the recurring summons 'Dare wind dare', addressed to the wind as confidant, accuser, and executioner. The title's challenge to time frames a poem of bodily stillness and dread - 'my hand is over my cheek / Resting my ear / From the silence / So loud' - where the speaker asks the wind not to 'Resemble my agony' and pleads 'it is you I seek / When spirit has gone away'. It builds toward a falling vision: 'Flutter me away to the floor of the deep', 'Twisted in fear of ghost beams', a 'frozen door' hiding 'the shadowed ice of terrible sin', and the final line 'Burning between us'. The two-line heading, 'Time, you have no right to my / memory-', opens the page as an address, so the refrains become speech against time's claim on what the speaker remembers, and the dominant gesture is a hushed, ritual address daring the wind to confirm an inward sin.