Working Girls - Redgum

She said she came from Portland

Where the ashen skies and leaden ocean

Left her like the local boys, barren of emotion

As we talked we watched the raindrops

Running down the window

Laundromat in Darlinghurst

Like a fish shop from the past

And her mother called her Mary

After Mary Magdalene

To deny her beauty

Would have been the greatest sin

It was a profile in the neon and a Kings Cross Doorway lean

To half an hour of tending someone else’s tangled dream

There were lines of sailors, lines of speed

Lines upon the Footpath where she stared

When things were quiet, as night deferred to dawn

And the coke cups played red rover

In the breeze that scuttled through the streets

Taxies left for greener fields

While Sydney stretched and yawned

And her mother called her Mary

After Mary Magdalene

There were virgins in the morning

She had sisters in the pain;

And the wives would clutch their husbands

Perhaps they shared the shame

'cause working streets and Weddingrings are sometimes much the same

She tap-danced with the buskers

Near the subway shouting blues songs

They remembered from their teenage years of dreamtime radio

And the years withdrew behind her eyes

To let the little girl look out

In simple childish innocence

At drawings in the sand

And her mother called her Mary

After Mary Magdalene

She had long dark hair and massage oil

And a key to let you in;

And the lines upon her face were maps of roads she’d travelled

Lined with people throwing stones because they didn’t understand

That a half an hour of tenderness (perhaps they shared the same)

'cause working streets and Weddingrings are sometimes much the same