Laughing Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern Pearls
Picture offered by Tess at Magpie Tales
Marilyn was a smart but troubled lady. I had an aunt who grew up like her when our family on my Mom's side exploded. My Mom too went to a kind of foster situation, but she was older and turned it to her advantage. Her little sis (half sister with different fathers) ran in the streets while my Mom took a college degree.
Soon They'll Find Her
She looks for promise
in the glitter of the night
just as they said to.
She's obedient,
sex kitten on their command
and innocent too,
just that way, fellas.
She's a student of our lives
and you'd think jaded
but the whispers come
slinking in the graying smoke
suggesting her pain.
She's tried to untie
all the knots she's come here with,
to simplify things
picking at the strings
so she can smile at us now
just once for damn real.
Written in memory of Nan Wire (nee Hogg)
and Marilyn Monroe, December 27, 2011 12:48 PM
Written for Magpie Tales #97 *click here*
Nan did okay in some ways, not so good in others. She was as MM was a child of "mean streets" more than actually living on the street. I don't really know but she may have had to use men to stay off the streets some of the time. Her mom and pop were alcoholic and finally too disheveled to keep the family together, how Nan ended up footloose. She went into foster care, but also into rebellion. She was alcoholic, taking after her family and in the end spent many sober years, over twenty. She was brittle emotionally. So was Norma Jean, however bubbly Marilyn was.
ReplyDeleteOn her path Nan trained for the ministry as a second career and graduated but found the job too emotionally taxing.
Nan could never quit smoking til far too late and caught a cancer of the lungs that metastasized and went to her brain. That killed her, a relatively painless death as cancers go. She spent her last years in service to the elders in the downtown subsidized apartment high rise that was her home and working at being an artist.
She was the mother of three daughters, the eldest of which died young in difficult circumstances but the two others live on, one in Washington and one in California.
Are broken pearls still pearls....?
ReplyDeleteNicely done.....
She's inspired a great many raw thoughts this day.
Beautiful sketch of her. The title slips almost under the radar, but adds another dimension to it. (They never did find her really, did they?)
ReplyDeleteI think every poet and songwriter rubs up against her in some way. So many men need to save the wounded angel. Of course that almost never works and yes, Joseph, they never did find her
ReplyDeleteAwww.
ReplyDeletepoignant and real. and so tender.
ReplyDeletei welcome how this poem will haunt me.
Sadly, we never knew her. Beautifully written, Christopher.
ReplyDeleteThank you both for saying so.
ReplyDelete