Red Shoes Retelling Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

the forbidding angels stand
and snowy aisle to aisle perceived
blocking candlelit the faint

rose of windows
she once loved.
she once loved the quiet woods

beyond but now she dances on
and cannot stop her vivid tarantella
to breathe in the scent of pines

gone shadowy as in a dream
and she is spinning past the moon
in a dress of silver and centrifugal

are her tears and unseen in the dusk
they fall thick as mercury droplets on
her red shoes

made of fine leather that blazed
in the shop window on that summer day...
and now decree from year to year

she'll always be this way
the ghost of her dancing on the turquoise seas
seen by little children as a warning that

truth in an instant disregarded has its cost;
yet God is kind and beauty unrelenting.
thus was the poet-storyteller told

by his transparent imagination
broidered with lilies
and solitary, aisle to aisle, in snowy steadfast

dreaminess transposed from heart to heart
and red as reddest roses shone, as fragrantly,
with a melancholy festiveness that lingers on,

and hidden, folded petal in petal
or under a heavy candy jar lid for our disclosing
sweet after sweet, little children

his love in
his love for art
and where it was deep midsommer...

mary angela douglas 26 april 2014