My Father’s Shoes
My mother asked us to find her relatives.
We started in the cemetery.
It was the biggest we had ever seen.
My father’s shoes hurt him,
though he didn’t say until it was too late.
It was a foolish thing
to go to a cemetery
but it reminded us of familiar ground.
We felt at home there
among the trees and stone
though we knew no one.
They were light shoes
– thin-soled, tan leather –
and more suited to the city
than to the endless paths we tracked
among the dead.
And what if we had found them?
They couldn’t have opened their arms to us,
welcomed us with their best wine,
their best coffee.
They couldn’t have told us stories
of how they’d come to be so far
from their birthplace.
They couldn’t have bathed my father’s tender feet.
Heron
Ardea cinerea
A heron stands among the reeds
at the edge of the lake.
It will stand for hours
casting its eye across the water.
Fish swim the waters
not knowing their fate
below this shadowing.
In the Otherworld
the heron’s task is to guard
the sacrifices made to kings
and guide the dead to the Afterlife.
Far away in the city an old man
sits on a park bench.
He will sit for hours
willing a heron to come to him.
The heron raises its wings
and lifts its weight
into the light of air.
The reeds barely flutter.