Tuesday 27th January from 7pm – 9pm
The Shelton Room at the Seven Dials Club, 42 Earlham Street,
London WC2H 9LA
There will be a short performance by the Live Canon Ensemble
of poems from the collection at 7.45pm
Please RSVP to rsvp@livecanon.com
Shoes
One shoe lying in the street.
Two tossed on the crosswalk.
More shoes leading to the bridge.
A path, a pattern, a confetti
Of lost, removed, discarded shoes –
Old pumps, new flats, heels, trainers,
Shoes without names, shoes I can’t name,
Shoes made for the future, shoes soon
From the past, shoes like spring petals,
Broken canes, cracked bones, shoes
Wrinkled as skin, buckles twisted, straps
Torn and snapped, tongues dried up,
Shoes heading to the tunnel, marching
Across the square, strolling around
The arcades, pausing along the esplanades,
Running and darting and scuffling
Through an alley to a dead-end pile
Of shoes. Someone there, in shoes,
Looks back as if to find where are they –
The barefoot people – and follows
A fading footfall down the ramp
To a river of shoes carried off.
Marcus Smith was born in Oxford, England and lived in Buxton until he moved with his family to America. After attending Williams College, Marcus received an MA at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was as a teaching fellow. He taught poetry and fiction while completing the Great Books Program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. After serving as a staff writer for several local newspapers and as a stringer for New Musical Express in London, he was selected as a Merit Fellow in Vermont College’s MFA program