A Poem for the Shoe Lovers Out There

My last day in New Zealand, I went to a “School Gala” which is like a rummage sale with fun games and live entertainment and food and all sorts of things to raise money for the school. It was very well attended by families and their school-age children but also by people from the immediate neighborhood and beyond, people looking for inexpensive things for their apartments or houses, and especially people looking for used books. That’s where we spent most of our bit of time at the gala – in a big room with a lot of other book lovers, flipping through many boxes of all sorts of books. If I’d been driving home rather than flying I might have brought home a few more treasures than I did but you know – weight restrictions made me be responsible and all that.

But! Marge handed me a slim volume and I plopped my $3NZ down for it. It’s by Elizabeth Smither, poems written while she was the third NZ Poet Laureate in 2001. This poem made me think of Mrs. Gail Burns and all my other shoe-loving friends and I admit to having a pair of loved red shoes too. (The poem immediately preceding this one in the book is called “Red Dress” which I like as much as “Red Shoes”. There’s another poem called “Shopping with Beth” which ends

and then, finally, I buy a black jersey
with a V neckline. I have heaps
of black jerseys, you have black shoes

we’ve just repeated ourselves, our
friendship is basic black, like the
little black dress, we regress

but in the last shop we choose
bikinis (as if we would wear them)
I choose black and you go for rainbow colours.

When I pulled out this book during my trip home, I discovered it was book number 179 (carefully hand written on a line) of a limited hardback edition of 2000 copies and now it has traveled far from its original home.

Red Shoes

Where the heel strap and arch strap
join there will be a blister at first
I know when I get them home
out of the box and the wrapping paper.

They are the colour of red lacquer.
The colour of a beautiful chest
fastened with mock gold fastenings
and the maker’s name is in gold lettering.

I shall wear them with everything
red complements which is everything
I own: those that fail shall be discarded
into bags for the Salvation Army.

With red shoes who can doubt
the heart has a means of action
as feeling moves forward to accomplishment
as I stretch out my shod feet on the white sofa.

— Elizabeth Smither,
Red Shoes, 2003, Random House New Zealand