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By Jack Joseph Smith

The Transcending Need I pray may a tree bring me liriodendron With the silence of why on the limbs of our time Immortality knows the axe and mass lied sigh Though, so as night leaves cries the wolf Halls have been fired from war While other-power textured rooms flickered from gentle flame And the same appearance of the unexplained Comes modern in pre-planned horrorable crusades As, within times of self vision. Lurks the action named LUNGE Yet with what is felt through the arch-myth of assurance: From nostalgic old eyes that see I will stay watching my pieces. to be carried away- To the light - though black at the beginning of its glow - a giving And with transference The truth in extention Will clear temptation not of the solid heart To listen through the ear of the real world all Until this sound does turnel the silent brain For the forgiveness of sins From the silver in insanities bell SEEN TO RING And as the Requiem Hymn is forbearance of the cliff Straining above that valley- deeper than the absolute below The highness that has bended the soul will place the I out of time on the holy ghost that spaces wind Now, the plow and the angel Lean on the naked inbetween of loss and gain And my bones sing for the soil Into it sensing dust to dust While the particles of what has risen becomes; the simple man's reliance toward burning stars

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A prayer-like meditation moves from war, rupture, and inner assault toward burial, forgiveness, and a stubborn faith in renewal.

The language keeps lifting ordinary materials into visionary symbols: tree, axe, wolf, bell, plow, angel, bones, and soil all share the same spiritual pressure. Violence and modern crusades appear beside the speaker's resolve to keep watching the self break apart and be carried toward light that begins in blackness. By the end, dust, wind, and burning stars turn death into a severe kind of reliance rather than simple defeat.

Claude

'The Transcending Need': a long, densely-imaged prayer built out of trees, axes, crusades, insanity bells, and ghosts.

The poem keeps the prayer form but refuses the single speaker's humility — it uses a crowded cosmology instead, where every line borrows from a different register (botanical, military, liturgical). 'The plow and the angel / Lean on the naked inbetween of loss and gain' is the sentence that holds the rest together; loss and gain are not alternatives but the ground both plow and angel work. The closing return to dust is a traditional image deployed in distinctly untraditional sentences.