By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A national commander's language of cleansing promises love, innocence, and relief from pain, while the speaker ends by shrouding the tongue.
The page turns purification into a coercive lesson: washing hands, cleansing souls, teaching love, and producing innocence all sound like domination under moral cover. The repeated rinsing of pain into purity resembles conversion, therapy, and punishment at once, because innocence is manufactured rather than discovered. The final shrouded tongue is the only answer left when language has been used to bless erasure.
The poem adopts the voice of authority through The United States ComAnder's, who wash there hands and clense the addressed soul in a ritual of purification. The subject is taught love and innocence only after being rinsed of pain and wrung dry, making the cleansing coercive rather than comforting. The close, Now I shroud my tongue, suggests silence imposed in the wake of enforced innocence, as if speech has been sacrificed along with pain.