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.

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