Uniforms

[image from google]

for Poets United Thursday Think Tank prompt: Uniforms

Their black and white robes
inspired fear, and awe.
Stern faces
peered out
from wimpled headdresses,
fierce, scolding.
Our consciences
boiled hotly
with our millions
of real or perceived
transgressions.
Even thoughts were
"occasions of sin".
Even dreams.
Especially our dreams.

"Your bodies are good,"
one lectured us,
which made us feel
hotly ashamed
that we even had bodies,
too uncomfortable
to think about
in a room full
of adolescent
boys and girls.

We wore uniforms too.
Hated pleated ones
with no style.
When we knelt on the ground,
our skirts must cover our knees
or we were suspected
of being "fast".
When I grew taller,
I couldnt say
I had no money
to buy a new skirt
and could not ask
my mother.
We were poor,
a shameful secret,
to be kept from my friends,
though the four
small cold rooms
we lived in
likely was a clue.

Once the fierce
angry little nun
who taught us music
fell off her stool,
so vigorously
was she conducting
the choir.
There was one
collective
indrawn gasp
of horror.
It was as if
Jesus had fallen
off His cross.
We were so obedient,
so in awe,
we did not move,
did not break ranks.
Her eyes flashed fire
and moral outrage.

No one would
have dreamed
of tittering.
She got up,
straightened
her tilting wimple,
climbed back up
onto her stool and,
shakily,
we continued
with our song.

Once at midnight Mass,
one of the Knights of Columbus,
a short rotund bald little man
with a shiny face,
self-important
in his Knights outfit,
dashingly and theatrically,
with a flourish,
aimed his sword at its sheath, 
and missed;
he had to try again,
somewhat chastened,
while the shoulders
of  the other Knights
shook gently and
some hands went up
to cover their mouths.

We saw
what nuns wore
at night
when their habits
came off:
on the clothesline
hung white
full-length
voluminous nightgowns,
and caps for their
shorn fuzzy heads.
Just seeing them
made us
uncomfortable.
They seemed
not to have bodies.
And, if they did,
we couldnt bear
to think about it.

At Mass, they sat
in contemplative rows,
reverent, but distracted,
their eyes piercing us,
wriggling in the pews.
We were
utterly mortified
if one of them
had to click
her clicker
to admonish
one of us.
Hot lava pouring
over our heads
with shame.

The rulers they carried
in the classroom
were to be feared.
They hurt,
across our knuckles.
There was never
a sound in the classroom.
There was total discipline,
that never, ever
eased.

The young priest
who said early Mass
one winter, caught
a terrible cold
that turned to pneumonia.
He kept on saying
early Mass,
us waiting in the pews
while his thin body was
wracked with
spasms of
exhausted coughing,
me watching
his upturned
radiant face,
so prayerful,
so dedicated,
above his  robe
of green and gold.

A uniformed world
designed to remove
individuality,
squash it,
raise us up
as a faithful
homogeneous flock.

The minute we reached
the exit,
at graduation,
we fled that world
with Godspeed,
and not one clue
about life
in the real world.
Lambs to the slaughter,
but frisky and
feeling our
newfound freedom,
we kicked up our heels
and cavorted,
those few moments
when it was
still and truly
ours.