Shoes

Home I bang the sand without of my shoes.

I haven't the craft to make a goat's-belly bagpipe

from a shoe or the art to play it,

but I can diocese my cold wet shoes

as unwept for bodies without a author of poems

I speak for the leather spirits of children.

I grasp one up: a newborn infant without breath.

I cannot smack it into life. I face

mountains of shoe endles lines of children

holding their parents' hands. I clutch a shoe to my ear

like a seashell-hear a child's voice:- the preserver is the old woman

who lived in a shoe she had for a like reason many children

she didn't know what to do. I hear the cries of cattle

begging for pity in the slaughter-houses,

I scent the stink of the tannery.

I am a shoemaker, not a bard.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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