Shoes

Shoes
(in a museum of Resistance and Nazi memorabilia)

Way-worn by Oslo
one Sunday afternoon
our feet sought out
a museum's gentler pace:

a museum of shoes,
regiments and regiments
in row on neat row
of children's shoes,
removed and set down in and orderly manner
before the little ones were gassed of an afternoon.

So bereft of meaning are shoes without feet.

Stout little shoes,
shoes with laces and hardly worn -
unsplashed through puddles,
unscuffed against bark,
not a toecap grazed to bewail a fall,
no leather creased into durable smiles
by the deft percussion of tiny soles;
shoes hinting of
just-beginning-to-walk.

And that's how
there erupted this blister -
through bearing witness
one Sunday afternoon
to a people and the manner
they met their end
so noiselessly
in their stockinged feet.

By Menna Elfyn, translated from the Welsh by Nigel Jenkins

Reproduced after viewing the Poor Mouth's photo here.