Ndrek Gjini’s speaker lives inside a house that is also, quietly, a burial ground. The two cemeteries the speaker describes—the cramped space under the stairs and the dusty attic—are places where used-up things have been laid to rest. Under the stairs sit shoes whose soles are “wounded from their run / through many rough roads.” In the attic lie dozens of notebooks, “badly scratched / with my handwritings.” Both kinds of object are finished, worn, no longer active, yet the speaker feels bound to them by a “mysterious power” they cannot name. The poem’s central idea seems to be that the things we exhaust—our journeys, our written thoughts—do not disappear. They settle into the structure of the self and become the soft support for whatever comes next.
The poem is built on a clear vertical logic. The ground floor holds the shoes, objects of the body and of movement; the attic holds the notebooks, objects of the mind and language. The speaker sleeps on the first floor between them. That middle position matters because it places the present self exactly between physical memory and mental memory. The surprising turn comes when the lower cemetery is called “my feather bed” and the upper one “my eiderdown.” These are not words of grief. A feather bed lies underneath, an eiderdown covers from above, both are soft and warm. The speaker is wrapped in endings. Memory, even memory stored in worn shoes and nearly illegible notebooks, becomes comfort rather than weight.
The language stays plain and conversational, with no rhyme or regular metre, but the poem is held together by echoing words. “Cemeteries” appears early, and then “rest in peace” and “buried” extend the metaphor without forcing it. “Rest in peace” normally belongs on a gravestone, yet here it is given to shoes, so their retirement after many rough roads becomes a small, respectful death. “Wounded” describes the shoes, while “scratched” describes the notebooks, so writing is presented as another form of rough travel. The phrase “sole wounded” is especially rich: “sole” sounds like “soul,” so the worn bottom of a shoe briefly suggests a whole self marked by hard journeys. Likewise “handwritings” in the plural sounds slightly unusual, as if each notebook contains not one smooth handwriting but many separate acts of writing, many versions of the speaker.
The opening line, “I have two cemeteries / within my house,” is so matter-of-fact that it sounds almost practical, as if owning indoor cemeteries were no stranger than owning a staircase or a bed. That calm tone is crucial. The poem never raises its voice. Short lines slow the reading down, especially around the shoes: “One on the ground floor, / in a very small room, / under the stairs,” as though the reader is descending with the speaker into the hidden, unused corner of the house. Even the word “small” matters; these are not grand monuments but intimate, almost overlooked spaces.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat the past as something to be tidied away or mourned. These objects are called dead, yet they are not removed or forgotten; they are kept in the house, close to the sleeping body. The speaker does not know why they are tied to them, and that admission of ignorance is more honest than a tidy explanation. The poem offers a quiet model of selfhood: a person is not only the present moment but also the worn shoes under the stairs and the filled notebooks in the attic. To sleep above and below them is not to be haunted, but to be held.