The Legend of Bluebeard's Daughters

The order had been given to extinguish the mad baron’s lineage
the bad seeds he had left behind.
Though born of many mothers
a particular shade of blue peeking from behind their lips
gave them away as his heiresses.
Their mothers, every one of them, slain –
beheaded by the hand of their patriarch
left the daughters orphaned, even before their birth
while still floating ignorantly in the belly of their bearers.
And even so, their willful little bodies crawled into the light with an unmatched tenacity –
a legacy that, it is said, they shared with their common parent.
and a fact that many believed testified to their inherited perniciousness.

If it wasn’t for a particular good citizen, a handmaid in the house of the Baron
the little creatures would have perished for certain.
For it was well known that Bluebeard abhorred the innocent,
surely then, a child,
much less a female child
much less such a unrelentless sequence of babes.

So swooped them up, she did, the servant,
quickly under her apron
severed the chord and delivered each one to the tall brick house
with crumbling corners and a decidedly sagging roof
where so many other children had been taken and set
bundled in a course sack and screaming,
they who had befallen quite a similar fate
with a knock on the door
and a hastening of feet against the cobbled streets,
a nose with a lantern prodded out into the night
from the dark of the doorway
finding no one.

There is a clearing at the end of the world
to where the villian’s daughters were banished.
Just follow the girl with the unkempt laces
past the empty purple house and under the fallen tree
deep in the brush just a spell to the left and then twenty-two paces due east
There will you find the notorious clearing
where the maidens were left to fend off wild beasts
and the hunger that would inevitably ensue.

But parish, they did not.
Instead, the forest enraptured them
browned their skin and caused their fingers to callus.
Its inherent abundance came willingly to their aid
and for the first time in their ill-omened lives
the girls were mothered.