Page 30
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker asks for companionship through change, sorrow, song and distant places.
Walking and a shared wing introduce the plea. Death, literature and the city's wires interrupt it before Paris and an American Indian reservation broaden the route. The closing SWEET and SAME name continuity; the marginal For / You lacks a settled place in the reading.
'Song' opens as a plea for company through change: 'Will you ever walk with me, when we are still / A change, will you go through REAL with me', then weighs sorrow, 'Two roads against the middle;' and 'Death the Proud Brother'. It urges 'Let us literature find a song in hurt', follows the singer 'first as a bird that is leaving / The wiries in the city', through 'Paris and an harmonica' and an 'American / Indian reservation', and ends in handwriting: 'knowing when grander is / SWEET, it is / The SAME'.
The poem ties companionship to song, treating hurt, distance and death as material to be sung rather than escaped. Its lines move by association and odd compound words ('dynasitystops', 'asertain'), which gives it an improvised, spoken rhythm. The handwritten close levels the grand and the sweet into sameness, a quiet resolution after the sprawling journey.