TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE NIGHT CLUB BURNED

What remains in the memory
of the survivors
are not the bodies--
twenty-four of them
stacked like hewn oak.
What lingers is not
the sweet night air that revealed
its power to dupe and betray,
in one treacherous turn.
No, what the survivors
lived to remember most clearly
was a silver platform shoe--
heartbreaking and meretricious,
cheap and strangely immortal
abandoned only feet from the exit.
In and out of the dreams
of twenty-five years
that flash of silver has appeared--
the unforgettable moment
when a girl was forced to shed
name and expectation
as she faced the startling night:
unshod, unadorned,
forever unknown.