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Cleansing the World Ironically
Ginsberg imagines the world as a load of laundry to be scrubbed clean, using household washing imagery to catalog environmental disasters, wars, dictatorships, and nuclear contamination. The poem names regions and specific pollutants—Love Canal, Agent Orange, Rocky Flats—then envisions rinsing out political violence and ecological ruin. The domestic metaphor underscores both the poet’s desire for purification and the absurd enormity of trying to launder global wrongs.
Read Complete AnalysesIf I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle, I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico, Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska, Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again, Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow, Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange, Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean
Homage to Kenneth Koch
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