The Poet was there, a Neapolitan stranger, looking at the dust of Amazonian forests ground down by greed. Then, charging through the hallways, hurriedly, flinging her shoes—high and black—past the gate.
Those shoes cast to the ground roared with a concentrated voice, as if it were possible to hear through them the distant, intense musical voice. Because there are women who use their feet to dance; others, however, use them first to groan and then to break free—for the leap that tears them from the asphalt glue and the impulse that smashes walls and barriers.
Whoever takes off their shoes seeks the lightness and comfort of a libertarian act: seeks the sea, the breeze, the state of communion, poetry, those eyes that see, the space, the wind, the storm, the touch of hands made into Renaissance sculpture.
At some point in a woman’s feet begins the path to paradise!
She, then, now discovering herself as woman and person, took off her shoes and kept them there, thrown, like a symbol of resistance and scorn, a landmark of liberation, a melodic design, an expression of intelligence, an invitation to a full dialogical encounter. That woman took off her shoes in search of skin, pores, and body; in search of the soul that travels through the veins, of the life that organizes the muscles and ravishes the breasts, in search of the light that shimmers on the lips and dilates the pupils.
That woman took off her shoes because the wings were not on her back, but on her feet. And she sought wings in her feet, wings to carry her toward the Alpine cabins, from where the Poet had arrived, to drink from the hand of Poetry or, who knows, closer, within a finger’s reach, in the Andean pathways and inns, or simply for the risk of a possible verse in the encounter of humans and beings only.
And now that woman, this woman, so close now, with her feet unbound, shoes thrown, stomps grapes with intensity, singing and dancing all night long. She lifts her dress to stomp grapes deeper still and, at dawn, throws more grapes into the press, continuing to sing joyfully with her dress raised, immersed in wine and poetry, poetry found on the street, in the hallway, at the gate, and in those feet, now, free.
© Pietro Nardella-Dellova: “Scarpe di donna or, why it is necessary to dance”, 2010
picture: Lilith, de John Collier, 1892