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MissBeWrites
Poems
May 2018
Ballad of the Radium Girls
Marie, Marie, what have you done?
Mollie still softly glows
with your beautiful radium
as if she were a star interred
slung over with human skin
except stars explode outward
not collapse from within.
Mollie, sweet Mollie, all but nineteen
sitting stiffly at her shift
quietly painting.
one by one, day by day
out came the teeth,
then her jaw removed
and the bleeding
that never ceased
yet the clocks all tick on
and numbers
must still illuminate.
This is war, girl, and
sacrifices are to be made.
Thirteen sisters dip their brushes
in the belly of the beast.
Their pursed lips
form the fine points
that detail work needs.
Undark atoms infiltrate
on each inhalation;
these unwitting scribes
are the ink in Our
industrial supplication.
This is the new world
with itβs new God β
Bright, shining Radiation.
Mollie, fair Mollie, five years now cold
yet in the dark you still flicker
like a trove of white gold.
We have come armed
with our shovels
and shame too terrible to be told
to clear your name justly
by burning your radiant bones
Based on the misfortune of the radium girls, hired by the US Radium Corporation and knowingly worked to death with radioactive paint for luminescent clock faces
Written by
MissBeWrites
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