Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)

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Rachel Sumner

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In the days when Rosie beckoned girls to join assembly lines
A mixture simply named "Undark" made wristwatch faces' shine
And women with star-spangled hearts sat faithfully in rows
Bent to help the boys entrenched stave off those dark shadows
Day-by-day they all were tasked to paint two hundred dials
With brushes made of camel hair and radium dust in vials
The numbers on the clocks were painted dainty, slim, and slight
So, the girls were taught to use their lips to point the bristles tight
The taste was a little foul, but no one really seemed to mind
The pay was more than three times what a girl back then could find
Radium was championed a new found fount of youth
And the few who knew the dangers kept the public from the truth
For a time, each painter prospered, though the work they did was tough,
And were delighted when they'd clock out covered in the magic stuff
They'd decorate their drabbest dresses, paint skin so they'd sparkle —
No earthly sight quite like a glowing angel in the darkness
Curie Eleison
Even lights that shine the brightest will eventually dim
But you never do expect it just as someone's life begins
As each timepiece passed through nimble fingers, painters dreamed and planned
Though they had, in fact, so very little time left on their hands
Soon these young girls ached as if they'd aged for eighty-years
And radiating pain turned into radiating fear
Doctors did their best to treat an unknown malady
But no remedy could keep those bodies from unraveling
So, aching turned to limping, and sore mouths began to bleed
Then jaws began to break and smiles gave way to crumbling teeth
Families became buried beneath doctor bills and loans
And grief, like radium, began to settle in their bones
Curie Eleison
To have so many sick at once seemed no coincidence
But the company, confronted, had maintained its innocence
Yet they'd secretly received results that told a different story
And they knew, despite their lies, that they were liable for the suffering
Those who had enlisted ladies to leave luminescent marks
Were now working overtime to keep them in the dark
Not a single protocol was changed at all, though there was danger
And ailing workers - failing fast - were easily exchanged for
Healthy, younger women unsuspecting and naive
Who craved to carve their own piece of The Great American Dream
Nothing pierced those stone hearts fortified by corporate greed
Even when the women's own hearts, one-by-one, had ceased to beat
Curie Eleison
I wish that I could tell you that somebody'd found a cure
Or that when the court case first came round, the crime was answered for
These women walked among the living having one foot in the grave
Still they used what fight that they had left so others could be saved
To this day no one can say how many lives were lost
Had they been sooner taken seriously it might have cut the cost
You may claim women have been long-since elevated in this world
But how can that be? Our ashes still speak louder than our words...

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