Marilyn Monroe's Photo In Blue (In Answer To T.T. Cloete) Poem by Gert Strydom

Boldly sits pretty Marilyn Monroe
but there is something more that this photo tells
than a pair of pants clinging in blue,
than only female attraction under a thin skin.
Stripped and very bare
the material and the silence scream
like her languishing life story,
with a painful lonely coldness.
More than her nakedness that comes from beneath
a person is totally astonished
and bowled over by her pain
and there is a kind of dark monstrosity
that hides beyond the mask of the actress,
of a heart that cannot cry itself out.