POETRY: Girl With the Red High Heeled Shoes

The Girl With the Red High Heeled Shoes
Dee Strickland Johnson, © 2009
(This is a true story which it has taken me nearly forty-five years to write)

Surely, United States Border Patrol,
is a job that few people would choose.
She might have been dead a day, maybe two,
the girl with the red high-heeled shoes.

She lay in the slight dappled, grudging sparse shade
of a small palo verde tree,
A merciless sun slew such shade as it made.
I found her amongst the debris—

Aluminum cans, sacks, and diapers and such
we find scattered about every day.
O, I’ve seen the dead and the dying too much,
yet this took my breath clean away.

She wore but one shoe – it was high heeled; bright red.
How it spoke of her tragic ordeal!
The desert’s unkind to both living and dead,
and the shoe in her hand had no heel.

She was young and she might have been pretty.
Probably fled from her harsh poverty
To some Norte American City
To begin life adversity free.

She’d left from some village one morning,
decked out in her finest new clothes,
With her hopes and her dreams still aborning:
red shoes, fancy dress and silk hose.


I cursed the deceitful “coyote!”
‘Tis sure she could never have seen
That he’d leave her to die in the desert
where the heat blazed a hundred eighteen.

He had probably told her, “A bus will come by.
Just over the hill there lies wealth.”
The whole thing was a lie: With result that she die,
while he lives by deception and stealth.

I knelt and cried, “¡Madre de Dios!”
I felt the hot tears on my face
As I lifted her ever so gently
and took her away from that place.

¿A donde vas, Seňorita?
¿Como se llama? ¿Who knows?
¿Maria, Rosita, Lupita, Juanita
con zapatos tacones altos?

Did coyote forecast that this trip be her last?
Be he damned for his treacherous ruse!
Her sun has long set, but I’ll never forget
the girl with the red high-heeled shoes,
I still weep for the girl in red shoes.