Poem: Lost Shoe
InReview
Shoes and sleeves, brambles and gleditsias, share in suggestions of winter’s end and spring’s beginning, in this week’s Poet’s Corner contributions from Sue Cook of the Adelaide Hills.
Lost Shoe
For weeks last summer
the shoe sat on the junction box,
like a pop art sculpture on a pedestal
framed by thirsty tangled brambles
edging the parched creek
where the path through the grassy reserve
curves into the next street.
A right foot sports shoe, high-top, with gold star,
jaunty pink, white and grey stripes,
now gone.
Perhaps it was the wrong shoe grabbed in a sale,
(buy one pair get one free)
now left to languish in solitude
until a naked right foot
jumps in
and walks boldly forth,
blue sneaker on the left foot
trying to catch up.
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Winter Knits
At the local roundabout
there’s a new driver distraction.
Someone has taken pity
on the honey locust tree,
forlorn and winter-naked.
Someone has knitted sleeves,
wrapped the knobbly thorny limbs
with great panache,
heedless of punctured skin.
Someone has created a kaleidoscope
of knitted colour, stitched into place
on mid-winter austerity,
warming the wizened gleditsia
until its green canopy
bursts forth in spring.
Sue Cook is a long-term resident of the Adelaide Hills. As a senior English teacher, she edited the annual anthology Spring Poetry Festival for the South Australian English Teachers Association for a number of years. Her own poetry has appeared in Friendly Street anthologies, various literary journals and magazines, as guest poet in a subsequent edition of Spring Poetry Festival, and online.
Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to poetscorner@solsticemedia.com.au. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.
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