Domesticity is the name of the trade,
a game where a woman seems
to play with charades.
Where dust rags and floor wax
rank high on the scale
of industrial want and domestic detail.
A game where a woman
seems to come in last,
Where cotton balls, and dust bins
with the garbage are cast
into the elements of old cards and tins,
a waste not, want not society of things.
Rubber gloves and cans of spray
enlighten and make up her day,
Too tired to think, too tired for sex,
just too tired to laugh, she’s feeling quite vexed.
This is what society says
that she must do in her miserable silence,
and all of her dreams and all of her hopes
are lost in the anger of her defiance.
Her defiance, her talents that washed down the drain,
with the comet of cleaners she uses each day,
Such hope poured in as she rinses once more
maybe one day she’ll be free and she’ll reopen the door
It’s her soul and her dreams that she scrubbed away
on the morning she awoke to live another dull day.
She made herself a promise, that she would rise again...
be the woman and the truth, the one inside that’s her best friend.

© 2004, Deborah L. Kelly