Page 11

By Jack Joseph Smith

The Back Yard of a Young Boy The sycamore is made a mother symbol without hands As a million leaves leave its white blotched branches To crawl over grass bent deep green by the storm The delicate lines of long willows sweep low To Touch the pond Then reach up crying under dark clouds Nothing cares as I walk there And we seem to invite distruction Ivy on brick protects The little things Climbing from the earth While the old basketball hoop buckles But stays to sware in the wind For father and son fastened it well Something cares as I walk there And we seem to invite resurrection And until another spring I will wait for the robin to suck to the stem The life of the cherry tree

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Trees, ivy, an old basketball hoop, and a cherry tree occupy a backyard where the speaker alternates between distruction and resurrection.

The sycamore is called a mother symbol, while father and son are remembered for fastening the hoop. The repeated walk through the yard brings both family labor and seasonal change into the speaker's attention; the faint marginal writing remains unread.

Claude

In the typed 'The Back Yard of a Young Boy', 'The sycamore is made a mother symbol without hands', willows reach 'To Touch the pond', and 'the old basketball hoop buckles / But stays to sware in the wind / For father and son fastened it well'. Two refrains turn from 'Nothing cares as I walk there' to 'Something cares as I walk there', and the speaker will wait 'until another spring' for the robin and the cherry tree.

The poem treats a storm-battered yard as a small world of care and neglect, moving from inviting 'distruction' to inviting 'resurrection'. The hoop fastened by father and son is the one human object that holds, which makes the yard a quiet image of family endurance.