Waxing Poetic: The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road by Muriel Spark

 

     Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was an award-winning Scottish author most often remembered for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  She was born in Edinburgh and attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls, the model for the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Jean Brodie.  She briefly taught English herself before marrying and moving with her husband to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  When the marriage ended in 1944, she moved to England and lived in the Helena Club in London which later became her inspiration for the May of Teck Club in her novel The Girls of Slender Means.  She worked in intelligence for the remainder of the war. 
     In addition to her 22 novels she also wrote poetry.  In 1947, she became the editor of the Poetry Review.  She had a long writing career, publishing her last novel, The Finishing School, just two years before her death at the age of 88.
     This poem ponders a question most of us have asked:  "Why only one shoe?"

The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road

One sad shoe that someone has probably flung
out of a car or truck. Why only one?

This happens on an average one year
in four. But always throughout my
life, my travels, I see it like
a memorandum. Something I have
forgotten to remember,

            that there are always
mysteries in life. That shoes
do not always go in pairs, any more
than we do. That one fits;
the other, not. That children can
thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion
chuck out someone's shoe, split up
someone's life.

            But usually that shoe that I
see is a man's, old, worn, the sole
parted from the upper.
Then why did the owner keep the other,
keep it to himself? Was he
afraid (as I so often am with
inanimate objects) to hurt its feelings?
That one shoe in the road invokes
my awe and my sad pity.