Anne Frank’s High Heels



Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored suede and leather  ...    
                                              — Anne Frank, Tuesday, August 10, 1943

When Miep took us home with her
She held us up in the air,

Eye-level with those eyes
You may know, eyes spelling

Sorrow-girl, wait-for-me,
Happiness-around-a-corner-

One-day, hurry-back, don’t-tell.
Two new hands took us in,

Skin cradling skin.
How empty we had been,

Only a little bit worn —
Not a penny, not a pebble

Dwelling within.
We became an altar,

An offering red as wine,
A wishing well.

She was made to carry us
Near and far,

We were made to bear
The pressure of her feet

In darkness, in light,
Their sweetness, their heat.

We were getting used to her.
Miep calls us a handsome pair.
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Submitted by Drone232 on June 18, 2022

Modified on March 05, 2023

46 sec read
8

Quick analysis:

Scheme AX AB XX XA CD DD XX DA XC XX BE XE AB
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 807
Words 154
Stanzas 13
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2

Phillis Levin

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Phillis Levin is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of five poetry collections: Temples and Fields (University of Georgia Press, 1988), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award; The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995); Mercury (Penguin, 2001); May Day (Penguin, 2008); and Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin, 2016). She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (Penguin, 2001). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, the Nation, Paris Review, AGNI, Grand Street, the Yale Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Southwest Review, PN Review, Poetry London, and the Poetry Review (UK), and have been featured in three editions of The Best American Poetry as well as numerous other anthologies, including Poetry 180, Poets for Life, The Art of Losing, The Waiting Room Reader II, The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. Translations of her poems have been published in Argentina, Peru, Israel, Slovenia, Hungary, and Poland. more…

All Phillis Levin poems | Phillis Levin Books

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