Page 94
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem offers a jagged anti-war vision in which bomb light becomes a terrible aesthetic spectacle that strips both people and perception bare.
Even in fragments, the central contrast is clear: vivid chemical blaze and "bloody beauty" are set against charred humanity, so war is shown as visually seductive and morally obscene at the same time. The reference to Raphael becoming abstract suggests that slaughter scrambles older forms of order and beauty. Its broken syntax helps rather than hurts, because the language itself seems blasted apart by what it is trying to witness.
This untitled typed poem describes 'Intentional celestial destruction' as 'vivid bombs unleashing / the chemical blaze / of good-by charred humanity' across 'the sky smeared canvas / of bloody beauty / that makes Raphael at last abstract', then turns personal: 'I can not remember lava / And war I have only known one to one', and ends on bombs 'Manufactured to drop on the objectivity of a dot'.
The poem treats aerial bombing as a horrifying art show, where the sky becomes a canvas that outdoes classical painting and 'warriors go blind' from the sight. Its second stanza sets that abstraction against the speaker's limited, personal knowledge of violence, insisting he will not lose sight of 'how intensely insane is slaughter', and the final line exposes the cold targeting logic that reduces people to a dot.