I Pick up my Footprints

I stoop to pick up my footprints,
somebody seeing me might think
I’m gathering mushrooms,
healing herbs,
or flowers into a bunch,
but no —
I collect my footprints,
my traces everywhere
I walked for many years:
Here are the footprints I left while herding sheep on the steppe.
Here, I took this path to school,
and these are my steps from my route to work.

“I’m gathering my footprints here
so that strangers don’t trample them,”
I tell anyone who’s curious.

(Epiphany:
a footprint is —
a symbol, by definition, of:
“something rooted in the past”)

In my mind, I slip my footprints
between the pages —
now whenever I read a book,
I chance upon an old footprint:
I study it for a long time,
the footprint I left as a child
walking beneath a cherry tree.

All the footprints gathered so far,
an entire footstep herbarium in books —
if I put them all in one row,
their path wouldn’t lead me home.


(Translated from the Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina)