Radium Girls (Curie Eleison) Lyrics

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...