Ernesto Cardenal

Prayer for Marilyn Monroe

Lord accept this girl
called Marilyn Monroe throughout the world
though that was not her name
(but you know her real name, that of the orphan raped at nine
the shopgirl who tried to kill herself when aged sixteen)
who now goes into your presence without make-up
without her Press Agent
without her photographs or signing autographs
lonely as an astronaut facing the darkness of outer space.

When a girl, she dreamed she was naked in a church
(according to Time)
standing in front of a prostrate multitude, heads to the ground,
and had to walk on tiptoe to avoid the heads.
You know our dreams better than all psychiatrists.
Church, house or cave all represent the safety of the womb
but also something more…

The heads are admirers, so much is clear (that
mass of heads in the darkness below the beam to the screen)
but the temple isn’t the studios of 20th-Century Fox.
The temple, of marble and gold, is the temple of her body
in which the Son of Man stands whip in hand
driving out the money-changers of 20th-Century Fox
who made your house of prayer a den of thieves.

Lord, in this world
contaminated equally by radioactivity and sin,
surely you will not blame a shopgirl
who (like any other shopgirl) dreamed of being a star.
And her dream became “reality” (Technicolor reality).
All she did was follow the script we gave her,
That of our own lives, but it was meaningless
Forgive her, Lord, and likewise all of us
for this our 20th Century
and the Mammoth Super-Production in whose making we all shared.

She was hungry for love and we offered her tranquillizers.
For the sadness of our not being saints
they recommended psychoanalysis.
Remember, Lord, her increasing terror of the camera
and hatred of make-up (yet insistence on being newly made-up
for every scene) and how the terror grew
and how her unpunctuality at the studios grew.

Like any other shopgirl she dreamed
of being a star.
And her life was as unreal as a dream an analyst reads and files.

Here romances were kisses with closed eyes
which when the eyes are opened
are seen to have been played out beneath the spotlights
but the spotlights have gone out,
and the two walls of the room (it was a set) are taken down
while the Director moves away notebook in hand,
the scene being safely canned.
Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio;
a reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
viewed in the sad tawdriness of a cheap apartment.

The film ended without the final kiss.
They found her dead in bed, hand on the phone
And the detectives knew not whom she was about to call.
It was as
though someone had dialled the only friendly voice
and heard a pre-recorded tape just saying “WRONG NUMBER”;
or like someone wounded by gangsters, who
reaches out towards a disconnected phone.

Lord, whomsoever
it may have been that she was going to call
but did not (and perhaps it was no one at all
or Someone not named in the Los Angeles directory),
Lord, answer that phone.

Tranlated by Robert Pring-Mill

PROMPT

As in Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” write a prayer for someone famous or fairly well-known, emulating the specific language/ diction one uses for such an occasion. Or, you can write a variation of a psalm or the Lord’s Prayer too.

Lights

Translated from the Spanish
by Jonathan Cohen

That top-secret flight at night.
We might have been shot down. The night calm and clear.
The sky teeming, swarming with stars. The Milky Way
so bright behind the thick pane of the plane window,
a sparkling white mass in the black night
with its millions of evolutionary and revolutionary changes.
We were going over the water to avoid Somoza’s air force,
but close to the coast.
The small plane flying low, and flying slow.
First the lights of Rivas, taken and retaken by Sandinistas,
now almost in Sandinista hands.
Then other lights: Granada, in the hands of the Guard
(it would be attacked that night).
Masaya, completely liberated. So many fell there.
Farther out a bright glow: Managua. Site of so many battles.
(The Bunker.) Still the stronghold of the Guard.
Diriamba, liberated. Jinotepe, fighting it out. So much heroism
glitters in those lights. Montelimar — the pilot shows us:
the tyrant’s estate near the sea. Puerto Somoza, next to it.
The Milky Way above, and the lights of Nicaragua’s revolution.
Out there, in the north, I think I see Sandino’s campfire.
(”That light is Sandino.”)
The stars above us, and the smallness of this land
but also its importance, these
tiny lights of people. I think: everything is light.
The planet comes from the sun. It is light turned solid.
This plane’s electricity is light. Its metal is light. The warmth of life
comes from the sun.
“Let there be light.”
There’s darkness too.
There are strange reflections — I don’t know where they’re from —
on the clear surface of the windows.
A red glow: the tail lights of the plane.
And reflections on the calm sea: they must be stars.
I look at the light from my cigarette — it also comes from the sun,
from a star.
And the outline of a great ship. The U.S. aircraft carrier
sent to patrol the Pacific coast?
A big light on our right startles us. A jet attacking?
No. The moon coming out, a half-moon, so peaceful, lit by the sun.
The danger of flying on such a clear night.
And suddenly the radio. Jumbled words filling the small plane.
The Guard? The pilot says: “It’s our side.”
They’re on our wavelength.
Now we’re close to León, the territory liberated.
A burning reddish-orange light, like the red-hot tip of a cigar: Corinto:
the powerful lights of the docks flickering on the sea.
And now at last the beach at Poneloya, and the plane coming in to land,
the string of foam along the coast gleaming in the moonlight.
The plane coming down. A smell of insecticide.
And Sergio tells me: “The smell of Nicaragua!”
It’s the most dangerous moment, enemy aircraft
may be waiting for us over this airport.
And the airport lights at last.
We’ve landed. From out of the dark come olive-green-clad comrades
to greet us with hugs.
We feel their warm bodies — that also come from the sun,
that also are light.
This revolution is fighting the darkness.
It was daybreak on July 18th. And the beginning
of all that was about to come.

PROMPT

Write a pre-revolution poem in the 1st person plural. See Cardenal’s “Lights” on page 301. Your speakers can be part of either a real army that fought in a revolution or an imagined army. If you’re writing a fictional-army poem, there should be some indication of whom you’re fighting against. Let there be a single idea that works through the poem at the metaphoric/symbolic and literal level similar to Cardenal’s “light.”