Vera Rich hails from England. She is the Editor of Manifold Magazine of New Poetry ...

"All God's Children"...

“A coin for Charon, new shoes for the road.”

So, the Museum guide says, Romans blessed

Their dead away. “Sound logic”, he opines,

“For those whose Empire’s heart was the Golden Milestone!”

(Though Merlin, Otherworldly wise, knew better:

The rough-spliced sandal-strap would serve the boy

An hour and all eternity…)

 

But Christians need no offering of shoes;

(Angels in icons glide on stocking-feet),

Dante through death’s three kingdoms, Bedford John,

Or Inkling Jack – none (if my memory serves)

Speaks of the Pilgrim’s need for sturdy footwear.

Only the barefoot dream a well-shod heaven;

Plantation slaves hymned golden slippers; prattling

Of scarlet boots, Avvakum’s young disciples

Joyfully leapt into the fire…

 

Yet, viewing Roman death-shoes (simulated

From nailmarks in the clay) my mind returns

To the dead of Kurapaty – Windflower Hill –

Where beneath pines, among the bones and bullets,

So many shoes survived the march to death,

So many to be listed: peasant “walkers”,

Gumboots made from old tyres, elegant

Feminine pantoufles, sturdy city lace-ups,

A gym-shoe trademarked “Riga”… Cleaned and counted,

Not for museums (“Footwear, nineteen-thirties,

Mid-Stalin-era”), not to identify

The dead by name (though some, they say, have found

Relics there of their kin) only to seek

Not who they were,  but what, what kind, what genus

Of people perished there… And toiling through

My long translation-task, and coining terms

Where English had none, I found but one answer:

Peasant and scholar, poet, clerk and worker –

All trades, all grades of life lie in those finds

Of lasting leather… Do not send to find

For whom the bell tolls, Master Donne; ask rather

Whom the shoe fits! For snugly it fits thee,

And him and her and ye… and, likewise, me…

Previously published  Manifold, No.39, 2001

Author’s notes:

PLEASE EXCUSE THIS LONG EXPLANATION - but the subject and some of the allusions may not be familiar to all members - though I presume that that Stalin's purges are -alas -sufficiently well-known.

This poem refers, in particular, to the mass-murder of up to 200,000 victims, shot at Kurapaty ("Windflower Hill") just outside Minsk, capital of Belarus, during the Stalin purges of 1937-41.

The burial site was discovered and excavated during the final years of the Soviet Union, and although the Soviet authorities (even then, in spite of the new official policy of glasnost - "openness"!)tried to claim that the killings dated from WWII and that the Nazis were responsible, the archaeological evidence (as well as some personal testimonies of old people who, as children, had lived near the site) overwhelmingly confirmed the earlier date!

The victims' clothes had for the most part rotted - but metal fastenings and trimmings and anything made from rubber or leather (in particular, shoes) had lasted, and was subjected to thorough archaeological/forensic study. It was my task to translate the Belarusian investigators' report into English.

Most of the "literary" and historical allusions in the poem will, I think, be familiar to the majority of Allpoetry readers:
However, in case some are not, I should, however, perhaps remind you that
"Jack" (C.S) Lewis - member of the famous Oxford "Inklings" literary group - wrote a religious-allegorical work "The Pilgim's Regress" - a kind of modern and personal answer to the "Pilgrim's Progress" of John Bunyan ("Bedford John");


Also, I should perhaps mention that during the 17th century Great Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Arch-Priest Avvakum was one of the leading figures among the "Old Believers", many of whom, including small children, voluntarily burned themselves to death;

and a Welsh legend tells how Merlin saw a young lad spend his money on sweetmeats instead of getting his sandal repaired - and when a bystander criticised the lad, Merlin said that the knotted strap would last "long enough" - foreseeing that within an hour the lad would fall into the river and drown.

The title of this poem (as you will probably recognize) comes from the traditional Afro-American "spiritual" "I've gotta shoes, you've gotta shoes, all God's children's got shoes" (I ask pardon of Afro-Americans if I have not transcribed their demotic correctly!)

and Dante and John Donne surely need no explanation!