“Another momentous experience was hearing Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milkwood’. Perhaps I never experimented with psychedelic drugs because I knew where to get my fix — through language like this.”

Sarah Mnatzaganian gives The Friday Poem a tour of her bookshelf.  Click on the photo to read this article.

Chalcolithic

i

Someone who loved you five thousand years ago,

puts his hand inside your shoe as if to stroke

your skin, to feel where your toes worked.

It’s the shoe you wore on your right foot.

The arc of your heel, your half-formed bunion,

have left their shape in the leather.

He mends an eyelet and re-threads the lace,

thinking of your fingers doing the same for him,

then stuffs your shoe with dry grass

as you always did before putting it on, to shield

from rock and cold. The shoe fills and stretches

as if your broad foot were still inside.

ii

Someone who loved you digs a shallow pit

in the floor of a cave, high above the Arpa river

which carried you away from him.

He lines the hole with plaster and rests your shoe

upside down, so your unmistakable sole can be seen

by the gods and by you when you return.

He covers it with your favourite ceramic bowl

upturned, to make a crypt, and lays two goat horns,

a river carp and a shoulder of deer around it.

He asks your ghost to come and eat, before he fills

the hole and smooths the floor. Nourished in the desert

of the afterlife, you keep watch, wait for him.

Note: In 2008, an intact 5,500-year-old shoe was found buried

in the floor of the ceremonial Areni-1 cave in Vayots-Dzor, Armenia.

Runner-up in the Telegraph Poetry Competition 2025

Sarah Mnatzaganian imagines her way into the mind of a prehistoric man mourning his lover in “Chalcolithic”, a beautifully understated poem inspired by a 5,000-year-old shrine discovered on an archaeological dig in Armenia.  Tristran Fane Saunders, competition judge.