Angela Kelsey

White Wedding Slippers

At night
my mother opened a chest and took out
her white silk wedding slippers.
Then she daubed them
a long time with ink.

Early in the morning
she went in those slippers
to the street
to line up for bread.
It was ten degrees,
she stood
for three hours in the street.

They were handing out
one quarter of a loaf per person.

–Anna Swirszczynska
Tr. Czeslaw Milosz
   Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness