By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
National cleansing arrives as a lesson in love and innocence, washing pain into purity until the speaker answers the ritual of shrouded mercy by hiding the tongue.
Pilate's hand-washing is recast as national policy: power absolves itself by calling domination love. The repeated rinsing of pain into purity sounds like conversion, therapy, and torture at once, because innocence is being manufactured rather than discovered. The last line matters because shrouding the tongue is the only answer left when language has been used to bless erasure.
The United States as Pilate: washes its hands, claims to cleanse your soul, teaches you to love and be innocent; rinses you of pain as you listen. 'You have wrung yourself dry, across my heart / Now I shroud my tongue.'