The Turquoise Slipper
As the death toll rose
of mostly the old
the turquoise slipper
peeping from the edge
of the screen in news film
of a covid ward
lodged in my head:
a talisman to hang on to
for its bold colour.
Among the rows
of prone patients
attached to machines
I imagined a woman
who, younger, her legs
supple and strong,
loved hill-walking
and wild swimming.
Sure she wasn’t ready to die
I pictured her easing her feet
into turquoise slippers
then shuffling
to an open window,
breathing lungfuls
of sweet spring air.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2020. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2020 was Janette Ayachi.
When colour arrives in this poem it is luminous on its passage through experience. How colour can take us in and out of worlds; from words to wide seas, near-death to far-living, the body unescapable until the end, but, regulated by muscle-memory and the taste of salt on the tip of one’s tongue. How the mind wanders, defiant of its spinal stasis, how the last objects we call our ‘possessions’ are symbolic of who we once were. What a beautiful poem, what observations, what compassion.
Author’s note:
I wrote three poems about covid. One was about a bird that seemed to sing ‘Weep-weep’. Another, ‘Threads’, focused on my fears for my son, an anaesthetist who was working with covid patients in intensive care. ’The Turquoise slipper’ was written a time when there were so many deaths every day that the tragedy of each individual death seemed to be lost. The one personal belonging in the clinical setting of the ward, it seemed to be asking me to write a poem about it. I made several failed attempts. Finally, I imagined the slipper’s owner as an elderly woman like me. The poem was an attempt to being her to life and in the fiction of the poem to save her life.
