Just Our Nature
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A regional poem that sees nature, industry, and politics as one shared system, with beauty always shadowed by extraction and civic damage.
A Western Pennsylvania nature poem that watches autumn arrive over a country where wilderness, suburb, and ruined industry share one ecology. Skies 'back like Nothern California, / or rather like Mohawk' open onto 'the dance of muskrat and deer,' rivers 'keeping coal,' and 'Shut down towns, visual as if whiped by war.' It ends on a guarded civic hope: 'politics, that has finely let us see the stars,' and university monitoring of 'three rivers' to keep chemical contamination 'from coming next.'
The poem's real subject is how a wounded landscape stays beautiful and how its people make peace with that. The line 'there is no sight of plastic and tin cans, / going down with the golden leaves this fall' offers a fragile, almost devotional cleanliness, while 'big steel / ripping livelyhood away with an arm meaner than adjunk' names the violence that emptied the towns. The title cuts two ways at once: this damaged coexistence is merely 'our nature' (simply how we are) and also 'just' in the moral sense, a way of life the speaker defends - 'we accept that type of critism as a way of life.' The closing image of careful 'University tubes' threaded 'through each inch, / of the water' turns vigilance itself into the region's modern form of stewardship, beauty now requiring instruments to protect it. On the typescript the typed word 'Just' in the title is struck through and a handwritten revision above it appears to read 'The Best Part of', turning the title from a shrug ('Just Our Nature') into a claim of value ('The Best Part of Our Nature'); the site keeps the typed title.