Lost Marlene Dietrich Love Poem to Ronald Reagan Found

Previously undiscovered love poems from German screen siren Marlene Dietrich?addressed to former friends and lovers, including Noël Coward, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Yul Brenner and Ronald Reagan?have been found in a battered old suitcase, the London Times reports.

The poems, written after Dietrich retired from the public eye, were typed mostly at night on playwright Noël Coward's typewriter. One, addressed to old Hollywood acquaintance Ronald Reagan, strikes a melancholy note: "A tense silence / Grips me Surrounds me / Grounds me to the / Messy floor Around me," Dietrich wrote. "No voice No wind No rain Just silence will remain / Around me What a fate / 'Too late cried the Raven, Too late'" Despite the intimacy of the poem, there is as yet no evidence that the two had a romantic relationship. Story continues below ?

Many of the poems strike a similarly morose and somber note. To Orson Welles, she wrote, "Even when you are dead / You are not safe, / Not out of reach." To her former lover Ernest Hemingway, she wrote, "Losing you / Feels like A fisherman feels / Who loses his catch He thought he had / So securely / Hooked / While piercing / The gills of his prey." And to Coward, "No more Body / To hold on to / While you Sleep / Just the Sheet. What a cheat!"

The poems were discovered and subsequently edited by Maria Riva, Dietrich's only child. Riva hopes to publish the poems?in part to refute the popular idea that her mother became a recluse out of vanity. "My mother withdrew because she was simply tired of being Marlene Dietrich," Riva told the Times. "She was tired of the endless effort to present an ideal of perfection even though she was not perfect."