Concubine

Concubine
Try to keep your mulish eyes from closing,
Keep your clever hands upon the reign,
Heaven knows He’ll smite you if you’re dozing,
And all your saintly work will be in vein.

It’s not enough to bear the cross alone,
A child’s trust is pure and implicit,
With diligence they’ll be your humble clone,
Their rectitude; you’re destined to solicit.

Ah! You blinked! You missed your daughter’s birth,
You blinked again! She’s no longer a child,
Or yours to keep, a creature of the earth,
Just tame enough to wander in the wild.

She was pretty, sacrosanct and chaste,
Her values and her scruples didn’t falter,
The oestrogen that surged about her waist,
Coerced her into thinking of the altar.

She called the pairs of eyeballs to attention,
Through what she thought was beauty and charisma.
Enduring certain toothless condescension,
Ignoring all that chauvinistic stigma.

For to gut a fish, she knew, required time,
And an instinct for the nature of the bait,
She dressed up like an actress in her prime,
And spent six years suspended in that state.

That’s not to say there were no propositions,
But they seemed to her the offshoot of a whim,
A gesture with a suspect disposition,
With the chances of enchantment seeming slim.

She touched the shoulders of one individual,
A colleague with two opals in his sockets,
But your watchful doctrine raged in her peripheral,
As those impious hands retreated in her pockets.

Now twenty six, she weighed up her upbringing,
With the now, endeavouring to see the relevance,
She saw that maudlin congregation singing,
As a way to quell the stampede of white elephants.

She failed to find the ardour in your union,
The refuse from an obsolete tradition,
Kept buoyant every time you took communion,
A coupling of duress and submission.

Her friends all seemed to revel in their sins,
Narcotics fused with casual coition,
They told her clarity ‘happens when it spins’
She named this view a ‘biblical omission’.

As this creature moved to modify her tactic,
Not for love but simply for the corporeal,
She bought a cautionary prophylactic,
And asked that colleague out to share a meal.

This woman, not duplicitous or streetwise,
Thought only of the romance and the skies,
She didn’t know that purity’s a prize,
That is shared by fourteen grinning sets of eyes.

I heard she bought a box of candlesticks,
The louring light was dancing on her frames,
With knuckles white she clutched a crucifix,
And exorcised each evening by the flames.

Ah! You blinked again; she’s found someone!
She scheduled an appointment with her maker.
You realise all you’re good work’s come undone,
As you stand with the impatient undertaker.