Arts Alive San Antonio

We are delighted to have the opportunity to bring to you a poem by Carol Coffee Reposa, the 2018 Texas Poet Laureate and one of our favorite poets. And we are pairing it with the painting, “Mountain Monastery in Montenegro” by our editor Jasmina Wellinghoff. We also want to thank the journal Tejascovido where Carol’s poem was first published.

A COVID-19 Sacrement
By Carol Coffee Reposa

“Wash your hands,” the doctors say.
So I wash them.
“Keep calm and wash your hands,”
The Alamodome sign decrees.
Hot water rushes between my fingers
And over my upturned palms.

“Wash your hands long enough to sing
‘Happy Birthday to You’ twice,”
The radio voice commands.
I work up a rich lather
Foam and bubbles everywhere.
With luck and suds perhaps I’ll rid myself
Of every misbegotten molecule,
Each errant cell.

“All the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand,”
Lady Macbeth laments.
So I wash still more,
Stronger soap and hotter water.
Maybe with such scrubbing I can shed
Those secret silent grudges,
Envy of another’s car or dress or poem,
The time I bit my sister’s arm
And almost hit a vein,
Her blood dripping on the floor.
I want to rinse it all away,
Rinse off Syria and Yemen,
Iraq and Afghanistan, the toddler’s body
Washed up on a Mediterranean shore,
His shoes still neatly tied.

I will strip it all,
Peel off the sickened layers,
Scour through skin, muscle, sinew
Even the memory of Pontius Pilate

Until I finally behold
Clean bones
And wait.