Meeting Marilyn Monroe Gail Hennessy #13

1.
you are here, shipped from Chicago
dropped
by crane reassembled from the legs upwards

 

we met in the Bendigo Park
you
tall as a three storey building

 

your skirt in that upward draught
ballooning
a giant meringue of white plaster

 

I used the red buckle on your sandal
to haul
myself onto the plinth you straddled

 

I heard your throaty chuckle
challenging
all those mores of the fifties

 

you were the pin-up girl
our mothers
never wanted us to be

 

we knew you as sex symbol
a commodity
fashioned by Twentieth Century-Fox.

 

 

2.

I am forever tied by memory to you
Marilyn
because on the morning of the day you died

 

nurse told us, a ward of new mums
Marilyn Monroe is dead
about time, one of them announced

 

she was a human being, the nurse
defended
and I, silent, held tight  my newborn son

 

swept by fear and a nameless, useless, protectiveness.

 

Gail Hennessy  2016.