Day 5 - 1.31.13

Prompt for: January 31, 2013
Subject or Theme: Victorian Era (any specific item - home, carriage, dresses, etc)
Word(s) to Include: entwine(d/s)
Forbidden Word(s): hat(s), house(s), horse(s), man, men, woman, women
Additional Parameters: Minimum 12 lines or a specific form (form can be under 12 lines but don't use haiku, senryu or tanka lest you raise the ire of the judge) ~ if using a form please state the form and provide a link if it is a non-traditional form.

“There is the strongest temptation to prefer luxury with infamy to hardship with unrecognized honour.” ~~ Harriet Martineau, 1870

Magdalene Laundry

Fallen strumpet, you poor egregious soul—
Have you no shame? Harlot
who succumbs to temptation, who dares
to let the ravages of poverty and passion
entwine—society abhors you scarlet ones
who tempt our husbands, who taint our sons
with your flagrant perfumed cravings.
Do you not know the rules?

I know what you in gilded finery cannot.
Your husbands come to me. They be but
shadows hiding behind the night lamps with their
soft bellies stuffed and smelling of fine cigars
and spilled whiskey. Your society
has secret closets. Dignity pales when
passion cries
for more than virgin princesses.
They pay fair coin for I am clean—
One of them hasn’t infected me yet.

Wife, mother; no more, no less.
A proper female is worshiped,
always angelic in form and composure,
virginal in her demeanor,
composed, compliant,
fitting precisely into the mold.
Yet you denied
the accepted denial of sexual pleasure;
that black barbaric abyss that must be
controlled, repressed.
Dare you show your leg?
Those who matter know
it is referred to as a limb,
polite society refuses
mention of underwear.

My mother taught me to sew a seam;
I’ve made your gowns, stitched each furbelow.
Shall I go blind
from the sailor’s scourge or dim light stitches.
One day’s wages on my back or a workhouse week
where the rosy cheeked spit red
when no one is looking, or sell their teeth
for a meal they’ll never eat.
Your tainted bits of silver feed my children.

But no, you would not resign yourself
to your station, you deliberately went forth
to degrade and infect the sons, the fathers,
to undermine the pillars of our society.
We, the well to do, will never step foot
in the abject misery of your slums
where you choose to sleep fifteen or more
in one small room. Why would we—
members of polite society?
We know our place.

The length of your noses doesn’t let you see
what is in front of you. You sniff the rarified air
in your gilded cage. Bare feet leaving trails
in garbage strewn gutters
can still stroll down grassy lanes and if you satisfied
my babies would die. You and yours created
this hell, not I.

Thus you, lowly, miserable reject
are confined to the
Magdalene Laundry.
You must purify your soul –
symbolically cleanse the dirty unmentionables
the of the rich as you wash
your soul of sin.
You will slave, unpaid. Your hair shorn;
no vanity. Wear the cross of the penitent,
let it sear and inflame. We will pray for your soul.
while the maid collects our clean clothes.

Repent what? I am neither mad nor corseted
in rigid bones of denial. Vapors do not plague me
and I never lay reciting the rosary
when earning my daily bread. There is no sin
in hating this oubliette you flung me in,
or mourning the children dead from your piety.
I bear the cross of your sins: the poor usually do.
I pity you.

Note:From Wikipedia: Magdalene Laundries (otherwise known as asylums) were institutions from the 18th to the late-20th centuries ostensibly for "fallen [sic] females", a term used to imply female sexual promiscuity. Asylums for these girls and ladies (and others believed to be of poor moral character, such as prostitutes) were especially prevalent in the Victorian era as a way to reform these prostitutes and to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted disease. The last Magdalene asylum, in Waterford, Ireland, closed on September 25, 1996