A sunset bleeds crimson over the mountains, and the poem's first instinct is not to admire it but to suspect a punchline. Art Gomez's "Nothing Beautiful Without Struggle" takes a proverb of the kind printed on motivational posters and turns it sour. The struggle is real, but it belongs to nature, and the beauty is what we get to watch while nature suffers. The central idea is that loveliness can be a symptom, even a disguise, for damage. Seeing through it leaves the speaker with nothing to do but ask an uncomfortable question.
The opening stanza sets the trap. "Olympics" points to the home of the Greek gods, which fits the line about divine humour, but the setting and the snowlines suggest a mountain range, so the gods seem to be laughing from the very peaks being described (that double meaning is an inference). Then the sentence slips across a stanza break and a semicolon: the sunset "makes lemonade from smog." The old saying about turning lemons into lemonade is cheerful, but here it is quietly grim. The poem implies that the pollution is the raw material of the spectacle, so the brilliance of the sky is partly paid for by the dirt in it.
Gomez then sets patience against retreat. Avalanche lilies "remain patient under / the retreating snowlines," a calm picture that carries a faint threat, since a snowline in retreat means something is being lost. The military language grows in the fourth stanza, where glaciers are "No longer staunch sentries" that "shrink from duty." The glaciers become guards abandoning their posts, which at first sounds like blame. The final line corrects that: what they expose is "human faults." The sentries have not deserted. They have been overwhelmed, and the guilt belongs to someone else. "Faults" may also hint at geology, at the cracks in rock that melting ice reveals, though that is a reading rather than something the poem states.
The wildflower stanza is the most unsettling. Blooms "dazzle the beholder, / blind to nature's trauma." Grammatically, "blind" could describe the beholder or the flowers themselves, and the ambiguity is useful: the person looking is blinded by brightness, and the beauty itself seems oblivious. Dazzling is a kind of blinding, so the very thing that draws the eye also stops it from seeing. Against this, "trauma" and the earlier "bleeds" frame the landscape as a body with wounds, so even the sunset's red begins to look like injury.
The form carries the same restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, speech-like lines in stanzas of three, four, three, three and two lines, so the poem tapers as it goes. Sound does quiet work, particularly the hissing s of "sunset," "smog," "snowlines," "sentries" and "shrink," which gives the poem a hushed, almost whispered texture. The verbs are mostly harsh ("bleeds," "shrink," "exposing"), and "blooming" is the one gentle exception, which the next line immediately undercuts.
The refrain holds everything together. "Even the gods love jokes" opens the poem and closes it, but the second time the asterisk is gone and the joke has no cushion. The asterisk in the first line seems to promise a footnote that is not supplied here, so I can only say that it marks the line as something to pause over. The last line drops the clever imagery for plain words, almost all of one syllable: "Why am I not laughing?" It is the only moment the speaker appears as "I," and that placement matters. For eleven lines the poem describes, and in the last it admits to being part of the scene. The question can be read as a refusal to be amused, but also as a sign that the speaker, and by extension the reader, expected to laugh and cannot work out why the joke has stopped being funny.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it avoids both easy options. It does not simply praise nature, and it does not lecture. It lets the beauty stand, shows what the beauty hides, and then hands the discomfort to us. In a few lines it suggests that finding a sunset gorgeous and feeling guilty about it can happen at the same moment.