Red Shoes Retelling

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