The Red Shoes

Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
first written April 1974

To Anne Sexton, who wanted to help me bury the red shoes,
and to Ruth Jones, my old rain mother.

When I was a young girl,
my mother gave me a red pair of shoes.
They'd been hers, her mother's and grandmother's.
She said they'd never wear out no matter what.
They were worn and wrinkled and weren't my size,
but she said I should put them on
and dance in them as she had done
when a girl, young wife and mother.

I'd watched them make her dance,
and they never let her stop.
She danced before the endless guests,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
She danced on dutifully,
and she never complained.

I saw the strain in her stride,
the hurt she tried so hard to hide.
"It is the dance to do," she said.
It was the only one she knew,
the one her mother had danced to.
"And now," she said,
"I give these shoes to you."

So I put them on because she had
and danced the dance reluctantly,
the silent ballet of my youth,
my first marriage failures,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
The red shoes were dancing my life away.

Then one day a raging fire began to burn up
all the barren places.
It even burned the red shoes
till they stopped dead in their tracks.
My fingers, those queen crabs,
reached down and clawed and tore
till at last, they let go--

Oh, I lifted my burning feet
to an old rain mother who blessed them
with her eternal breath
and cooled them
with her loving kindness
till bloody, bruised and raw,
they began moving on their own.
And my hands, those celebrated sheriffs,
arrested the shoes, locked them
in a closet box and closed the door.

In time calluses grew and covered my feet
but I gave birth to a barefoot baby
who must not find the red shoes in her play.
She must not hear them rattling
in the closet box, calling her name.
I will dig down to their death
and bury them with my rage,
that good and righteous bulldozer.
And there will be another wearing,
another running, another dance.

Note:
Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled LIVE OR DIE. She took her life in October of 1974, just 2 months after she had telephoned me to say she was sorry she had missed seeing me at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She and I had a brief correspondence. When she called me "Judith," I was 29 years old then and heard my given name spoken for the first time.

Ruth Jones was my first therapist and emotional mother who reparented me. She was old when I first sought her out for answers. I call her my "old rain mother" because she helped me begin to wash away all the filth and shame I had felt as a child who had been sexually abused.