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Footwear: A Poem

I know I don’t need another pair of shoes,
But they, I see – although second-hand –
Are finely made – to my mind, beautiful:
The standard – the accuracy – of stitch,
Standard of suede, are of a condition as good
As any I’ve seen: these would be expensive
Were they found where they were new.
But what reason to buy them? It’s not
An issue of price, of finding the inexpensive
And treasuring the saving: is it quality?
Excellence? These are mere words,
Language, abstracts, matters of imagining:
And yet, are not such things most made
Of words, of the opportunity for speech?
And not just any speech: they are a chance
Surely to rejoice in certain words – diligence,
The meticulous, the painstaking, assiduous –
Here, where these live most in the discarded,
Where other words crying out for use
Are worn through at the sole, and where
To be sincere in anything is to go barefoot.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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