The soul of a human being becomes the poetry of our universe. In college I took a class in poetry and only God knows why because I had never had much interest in poetry before. I remember learning about all the meters and lines and names like Sonnet and I have long since forgotten most of it. But what I remember about poetry was our collective trying to understand the meaning of the poem as the author wrote it. There were as many opinions as lines in the poem.
For me poetry was always those couplet or quartet of lines that rhymed. They surely produced some strange poems as people struggled to make them rhyme – “I love a brown cow, I know not how.” Then I came across some poems that weren’t like that at all. In fact, they didn’t have a rhyming bone in them. They were free-form in structure it seemed to me and many didn’t make any sense to me. Our class struggled with those most of all.
And then, one afternoon as I was awakening from a nap a poem came into my head about shoes of all things. It doesn’t make any sense really, but it came from deep inside my soul and must be an expression of that soul somehow. I don’t know what it means except to say that earlier in the day I had noticed a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire that crossed over a street. Anyway, for what it’s worth here it is. Maybe you can make sense of it!
Shoes
Shoes have soles.
We have souls.
How peculiar, these shoes, these souls.
Shoes – varied, mixed, new, old, bumpy, smooth.
Laced, snapped, strapped, and Velcro closed.
Shoes with soles.
We have souls.
Souls – spirited, righteous, evil, gracious, good.
Open, closed, generous, stingy, kind, spiteful.
Souls as textured as our many personalities.
Soles are flat yet not.
Treaded, smooth, slippery, paper thin or tractor tire thick.
Shoes reflect the wearer – rugged, dainty, durable, flimsy.
Shoes – clean, trim, neat, dirty, ragged, messy.
Soles for dancing. Souls for dreaming.
Soles for standing. Souls for thinking.
Soles for running. Souls for imagining.
Soles for prancing. Souls for praying.
Shoes have soles.
We have souls.
Our soles reflect the wearer.
Our souls reflect the bearer.