Poem: Why I Love High Heels

WHY I LOVE HIGH HEELS

I love high heels because they’re sexy and elegant, especially on tall,
slender women with long, narrow feet and slender calves.

I love high heels on women who wear short skirts
and nylons, their beautiful legs and feet set off
by their high heels tip-tapping on marble floors.

I love high heels because I used to wear them
when I was young, we all did, and they added
three inches to my height.

I love high heels and would like to wear them again, but can’t. My feet
have widened considerably as has the rest of me, and I’ve grown into
my wide wide

sandals, flat-soled, of course, and would not try wearing high heels
for fear of breaking my neck.
Anyway my chances of looking sexy vanished twenty

years ago. When I broke my ankle, I hated wearing
a cast and using a walker and worst of all, having
to ask for help, and I won’t chance it again, though

I love high heels and in another life, I plan to be tall and slim with
narrow feet that never hurt and a closet full of high-heeled shoes and
short skirts

and the long legs to go with them.


by Maria Mazziotti Gillan - from What We Pass On: Collected Poems: 1980-2009 (Essential Poets Series)

Maria's poem "Why I Love High Heels" has been paired with the fine art photo "Golden Shores of Woman after Picasso" by Adel Del Gorgy as part of the Cross-Cultural Communications Art & Poetry Series on the website IMMAGINE & POESIA - an international artistic literary movement founded in Torino, Italy, in 2007, under the Patronage of the late Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas. The Charter Members were Aeronwy Thomas (poet and writer), Gianpiero Actis (painter), Silvana Gatti (painter), Sandrina Piras (poet) and Lidia Chiarelli (coordinator and ideologist of the Movement).