OK, I bought the shoes
though really I had no business,
they aren’t in the post-divorce budget,
the happy weather they’re made for
is cooling to grey, calling for boots.
It was the color I needed more than food,
an earthy apricot, it made me think
of the sky in Bosnia that summer
a few years after the war, and how on every
street of every city people would gather
at the storefronts selling shoes, standing
between the bomb-eaten walls of stone
looking intently and only at shoes,
debating their merits in a tongue swollen
with history, as if strolling in fine leather
down the avenue at dusk could remember
them to beauty,
as if to coax their feet
to stand them up again
to step out of the door
or the absence
of a door
While There Is Time--
if there is time--
let us lie down
in the grass
like children,
let each green blade
pry the soot and din
from our senses,
cradle our prodigal bones,
let us take communion
of pollen and sky, dazzle
and petal, let us bury
our tired fists, our broken
reason, let the Greek chorus
of insects sing and dance
over us the story
they have always told,
how it began
and how it will end,
let us discover
we’d give anything at all
to lie in the grass,
empty
for once,
and listen
Frances Hatfield’s work has appeared in Parabola, Jung Journal, Psychological Perspectives, Numinous, Monterey Bay Anthology of Poetry, The Book of Now, and others. Her first book of poems, Rudiments of Flight, was published by Wings Press last year. It was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters poetry book prize, and has recently been nominated for a Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Frances lives in Santa Cruz, where she practices as a Jungian Analyst and depth psychotherapist.