By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem admits that bitterness in art can poison family life, then twists that violence into a bleak image of poetic love.
Hatred, gossip, and getting even are treated as habits that do real domestic damage, not glamorous emotions. The closing comparison is deliberately unsettling: poets kill like birds do with worms, yet the act is still named as love lifted toward the sky. That combination makes affection look consuming rather than gentle.
'Friendship Lost' warns that 'The hatred in a poem / Will get you nowhere / With your wife / And children', names the fears of 'gossip', 'Cutting remarks' and 'Getting even', and then admits 'So we poets kill / Somewhat like birds / do with worms / Loving them,' before the final line 'all the way to the sky'.
The poem moves from domestic caution to a self-indicting confession about what poets do to the people and friendships they write about. The bird-and-worm simile makes love and consumption the same act, and the isolated last line lifts that killing into flight, leaving it ambiguous whether art redeems the harm or simply carries it higher.