Preamble - David Fennario, local playwriter, introduces his new idea...

Wrote this over the last two days and decided it was the seed for another anti-war play, a companion piece to 'Bolsheviki' (see poem below). Women munitions workers from Vieille Verdun/Pointe Saint Charles telling a story that culminates in the anti-conscription protests of 1917. The old factory still stands in Verdun and operated as a factory outlet into the 90's-now of course gentrified.
My ma worked in the same plant as a munitions worker in the 40's and I'm sure I must have met and known the young women who got their pictures taken in 1917 later as mothers and grandmothers on the Avenues.
Will scan the photo mentioned in the poem once I figure out how to use this new computer
dave
Googled Rose Henderson and couldn't find anything on her. No big surprise.

Poem by David Fennario

Women Munition Workers
History hidden in plain sight

I see the photo in book after book on the First World War and have learnt to look for it
yeah
there it is again
The photo with the caption

"Women factory workers inside the British Munitions Supply Company lunchroom in Verdun, Quebec"

table after table of them in their hundreds all dressed the same
in dollymop dusters and worksmocks with the same blank look at
the camera in book after book
same photo
same blank look
mothers wives lovers daughters sisters
comrades and union mates
presented the way they want us remembered
passive participants in the war effort
ready to do whatever we’re told

but there is one face
amongst the hundreds
that stares with eyes that
challenge the image
the look of someone stunned
into bitter understanding
by some bitter loss
someone lost in the war
brother lover husband
like Rose Henderson from the Point
described as a ‘labor militant’
and quoted in the Montreal Star July 14 1917
at the time of the Anti-conscription riots in Quebec

"Our men die abroad and our children starve because of the war profitters. I’ve lost every relative except one."