Shoes

What atrocities befell my Slavic ancestors
during the war, I cannot say. But I’ve heard
Czeslaw Milosz read poems in Polish
from the pulpit of Washington D.C.’s Church
of the Reformation. His words, at once familiar
and gorgeously foreign to my ear, were kin
to our cowboy verses lilting
through the Library of Congress
the night before. The morning after
hearing Milosz, I wept
different tears in the Holocaust Museum,
one for each mildewed shoe
heaped in a musky, dark exhibit
backdropped by large snapshots of mountains
of shoes at Auschwitz. Brogan or slipper
resting upright, did those, open to the sky,
signal to the ashes of feet
drifting from the stacks—brittle, warm
flakes of flesh finding their way
defiantly back to their shoes? I am torn for life
between the desperate need to believe
in the unfathomable, and the grimace
to forget—what I smelled, what I tasted,
what I heard and witnessed, but could not
reach out and caress. I wanted to run
my cupped hand into each shoe with hope

of finding one matched pair
still together five decades after
the condemned grandmother’s, grandfather’s,
husband’s, wife’s, sister’s, brother’s,
daughter’s, son’s, cold numb fingers crawled
through their last unlacings.
                                             Milosz’s poems
spoke to 83 years of knowing how death
fills up a life—the suddenness of manhood and then
back to a boy reliving his fancy
for fiery workings of the village
blacksmith hammering out iron shoes
in a Lithuanian livery. Cowboy poetry, I swear,
pinged from pulpit to pews
to choir loft and cathedral ceiling
in D.C. that night. I wore sneakers out of fear
for dark city corners and hatred still
seething in the ethnocentric minds of man,
left my hat and boots in the room
and walked, bewildered in squared-off circles,
after seeing Museum and Milosz. Avoiding the faces
of everyone I passed, left me alone
in my world of shoes—leather, laces, tongues,
toes, heels, seams and eyes
of trainload upon trainload of the doomed
peeking between slats of boxcars—the coldest
exhibit you’ll ever step into—where they stood
still in their shoes.

                              What I ask now is
that each of this world’s soldiering poets writes life
back into one shoe of the persecuted—softly
as a mother’s fingertip to her teething child’s gums,
rub olive oil into the leather until you feel it
breathing again. Choose your most truthful
words, your most vital music,
worthy of being sung in synagogues, in temples,
in kivas and tepees, museums and mausoleums
and in the very church where Milosz sang,
where a woman, moved to tears
by the otherworldliness of such singing,
handed up to him a single rose—his final lines
like the Gods’ own chain lightning
dancing across a thousand hands
lifted in long applause. As I watched
the shaking mosaics of stained glass
windows arched above me, I feared this poem
would make its way closer to home. Now, I must
sing to you of the bugle-
beaded horse-tracks-on-buckskin
Sioux moccasin, so tiny against the black
mountains of shoes—one baby’s bootee found
frozen in the snow at Wounded Knee.

Collisions of Reckless Love CDs are available from the Western Folklife Center (phone 775-738-7508, ext 2) and CD Baby.

© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.