Feet get the first word in Dave Bonta's "Ode to Old Shoes," and they are not polite. They "seek freedom," "busting the broadest toe box," and the poem follows them from that small rebellion to the larger question of how a person should walk through a life and where that walk ends. The central idea is that the shoes worth honoring are the worn, forgiving ones that let us meet the earth, not the stiff, handsome ones we wear for show. In the end the poem suggests that both shoes and people finish their journeys in the ground.
The form suits that humility. The poem is eleven unrhymed couplets with no capital letters and no punctuation, so the whole thing reads as one loosely unspooling sentence. Nothing marks where a thought stops, and the reader is carried along the way a walker is carried by a path. The short, plain lines also keep the poem from sounding grand, which matters in a poem calling itself an ode. Odes usually praise gods, nightingales or great urns. Here the subject is something you'd find by the back door, and the title is half a joke and half a sincere promotion.
The sound of the opening is full of effort. "Busting the broadest toe box" piles up hard b sounds, and then "splaying" and "gape" make the lines spread out the way toes do. Mouth imagery quietly takes over. The feet "gape," then "savor without ingesting," then "rely upon without clinging." It is as if feet were a second set of senses, tasting "a repertoire / of grounds and surfaces" without swallowing them or holding on. The parallel phrasing in those two lines gives the poem its most balanced thought: we should enjoy the world and lean on it without possessing it. Even "the gravity of it all" works double duty, since gravity is the physical force pressing the feet down and also the seriousness of being alive.
The poem then makes a sharp turn. "A lesson from the dust / of the ancestors" brings in death, and the ancestors, we are told, "would've gone to rest / in their best shoes." What follows is the poem's best joke: "the straight and narrow ones / that pinched all through church." The phrase "straight and narrow" describes a tight shoe and also the path of strict moral behavior, and it pinches in both senses. Respectability hurts, and people wear it even into the grave. Against it Bonta sets "the ones they worked / and walked in," the shoes that actually held a life. The poem plainly sides with those, though it never lectures. The contrast is carried by the objects alone.
The two similes that follow describe those working shoes: "soft as spring rain / tough as old chewing gum." The first is lovely and the second is deliberately unglamorous, and the poem needs both. A good old shoe is gentle and stubborn at once, and the chewing gum, stuck and stretched and impossible to scrape off, is an oddly affectionate image of durability. It keeps the poem from drifting into sentimentality.
The ending is quiet and a little unsettling. The shoes go "settling at the dump / into holes just their size." The word "settling" suggests sinking, resting and coming to terms, and "holes just their size" echoes the graves the ancestors lie in. A reader might also notice that worn shoes have holes of their own. The ancestors may have been buried in their pinching best, but the shoes that really carried them end up in the earth as well, fitted to it. Nothing is lamented, and the last image feels almost comfortable. Being returned to the ground is treated as a natural conclusion to a long period of walking on it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so few words. It starts as a lighthearted tribute to comfort and slips into a meditation on mortality and honest living without changing its tone. It finds philosophy in something ordinary and leaves us looking at our own shoes, and at where they are taking us, a little differently.