In the minutes after birth, when midwives
do their weighing, swaddling, when they
hand you to your mother for your first suck,
all your shoes line up outside the room:
tiny soft-cloth purses, straight-laced
school brougues, one-night pairs you hired
for bowling, ice-skates, thigh boots, killer heels,
right through to soft again – misshapen slippers.
There is mercy in this moment,
so fleeting that your mother, father, never walk
the line, nor see it falter into sole-holed poverty,
or stop halfway with an immaculate stiletto.
Besides, you cannot read the runes from shoes.
You might become an actor, a dictator, barefoot
centenarian, a rumour, a ghost, a name in a book.