Page 2
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The lines imagine a natural human joy buried under industrial force and chemical escape.
Iron coal and steel presses against the image of babies meant to be laughing in the rain, so innocence is immediately set against a hard mechanical world. Our own storm gives that rain a double edge: it is both trouble and something native to us. No more chemical heaven sounds like a rejection of artificial consolation in favor of a harsher but truer life.
An untitled typed poem that sets 'Iron coal and steel' against the claim that 'Our bodies as babies / Were ment to be / Laughing in the rain / Of our own storm', then closes, after a gap, with 'No more chemical heaven'.
The industrial opening and the image of laughing babies pull in opposite directions, so the poem reads as a lament for a natural joy that hard materials and chemicals have displaced. 'Of our own storm' makes even trouble something native and welcome, which gives the last line its force as a refusal of an artificial, drug-made paradise.