Untitled ("West Virginia is beneath the shore")

By Jack Joseph Smith

West Virgina is beneath the shore When it all gets here we are already dead Like a reverse Hindu I turned cows into human beings All my life I watched no difference between the sun rise and the sun set So don't use that play on words with me When I strangled the groundhog He wished he knew the differance between entrance and exit That's horse meat son They would rather have a kernal But in tight times they will cud on fleash We never traveled even though we knew which way the crow flies

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker names West Virgina, compares turning cows into people with being a reverse Hindu, recalls killing a groundhog and speaks of meat and staying in one place.

The speaker uses violent and religious comparisons to challenge distinctions between beginnings and endings. Those comparisons express the speaker's language; they do not establish religious identity or confirm acts in the writer's life.

Claude

The poem says 'West Virgina is beneath the shore', 'Like a reverse Hindu I turned cows / into human beings', 'All my life I watched no difference / between the sun rise and the sun set', 'When I strangled the groundhog', and ends 'which way the crow flies'.

Rough humor about meat and survival frames a sense of being stuck in place. The speaker's claims about cows and the groundhog are the poem's statements.