Grandma's Wedding Shoes Poem by Ravi Kopra

I'm getting ready
For the garage sale tomorrow
My grandma passed away
A few weeks ago
She was a collector of things
You would never know.

I am thinking to sell
Her pair of wedding shoes
She wore one morning
Sixty years ago
Walking slowly
In a long tailed wedding gown,
Holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand
While her father held the other
Soon to be given away to her beau,
Walking beside her proud and smiling
In a wedding tuxedo.

Could she have wildly imagined then
That Thirty years later
Her unwed daughter
Would give me up for adoption
Shortly after I was born?
My mom, a poor mother
Could not face raising me up.

I look at the pair of shoes
They still look like new to me.
She saved them as a treasure
In the original shoe box, tucked
Under her wedding grown
In her old leather suitcase
Made in some small
Now a non-existent Texas' town.

The shoes are high heeled
Light brown, each with two leather straps
To go around the ankles
Some sort of a hybrid
Of dress shoes and sandals,
High fashion luxury of grandma's days.

I look at them again
And change my mind
I will not sell them
They are worth a fortune to me.

Sixty years ago
After I do, I do
The choir boy rang
the wedding bells
On the top of the steeple.
That moment, my grandma
Was wearing these shoes.