You Belonged To The Entire World Poem by Patti Masterman

You belonged to the entire world
As soon as you dyed your hair blonde:
But we had to remake every part of you;
Nothing of your real self could remain
To fill the shoes of the fantasy you were to become.
We trademarked your smile
We copyrighted your dimples;
Could recognize that silhouette anywhere,
With or without sunglasses.

We celebrated all your triumphs with you
But mainly mourned your losses.
And we always expected you to squeeze yourself
Into the corset of our expectations:
Child, temptress, sylph, ditzy blonde;
So many conflicting roles we wanted you to play
And at the same time, the only wonder was
That you didn't implode years earlier.

But we always knew you belonged to us
Body and soul; and for your part
You seemed to accept our yoke;
So that now your explicit curves
And your exponential geometry
Are the standard; you raised the bar for everyone else
Even though there will only ever be
One Norma Jean.

You can never really die;
Encoded in our national dreams as you are,
Even though for one night out of your life
It proved to be too much for one woman to carry-
But now there will always be fresh flowers,
Next to your name
Because we still carry the torch, for you:
Age wasn't allowed to work it's torments on you.

Eternally young and fresh faced now
In our collective memory, you will always remain
Accessible as that day, your skirt blew up around you
And you laughingly pretended to try to hold it down
You were always prettiest of all, in your pretensions.