By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker urges action through work and revolution and calls California home. The writer inserts Sorrow beside the line uno cintiava is my name.
The speaker pairs a brain and hope with thread and rope, and tells the addressee to rise and speak. The handwritten Sorrow near uno cintiava is my name places grief beside that self-identification. The final claim to California gives the declarations a location.
'Doing' is a column of short declarations: 'No jaw meats my brain / No cumberbust has my hope', 'The end of the thread is the rope', 'Rise up this time to tell', 'Quitting is old'. It shifts into Spanish-inflected lines, 'Clashed with esta nada / No todo el mondo,', with the handwritten word 'Sorrow' written above 'uno cintiava is my name', and closes 'Public as a prince / California remains my home'.
The poem reads as a terse manifesto of persistence, mixing combative commands with images of thread, sash and revolution. The shift into Spanish words and a declared name gives the ending a sense of personal identity, and the unplaced 'Sorrow' above that name adds a note of grief without explaining it. Short lines and flat statements keep the tone defiant.