A three-year-old looks at her grandmother and notices two things: blonde hair and old feet. Mary F. C. Pratt's epigraph presents the poem as that child's description, but what follows is far more than a toddler could say. The better reading, I think, is that an adult voice picks up the child's blunt, surface observation and opens it like a door. The hair, which only the title mentions, is never heard of again. The poem stays with the feet, because that is where the history is.
It opens with a question, "Do you know" where those feet have been, and the question works like someone leaning in to share a secret. The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its lines are uneven and its sentences spill over the line breaks, so that "those feet have tripped / down a city street" really does seem to walk on from one line to the next. The sound is quiet too. In "steady and soft" and "silent room" the soft s-sounds seem to imitate the tread they describe.
The second stanza is the longest, and it moves through a life by way of footwear. First come bare feet, dancing "alone on cool spring grass" and leaving prints in sand "left wet by the ebbing tide." Even here there is a small tension, since prints on a beach are exactly what the tide erases. Then "stylish shoes" carry the walker down a city street "on some dark errand." That phrase is the most tantalising in the poem. It hints at a story and refuses to tell it. "Tripped" is similarly double-edged, suggesting both a light, quick step and a stumble. Finally, "heavy boots" take her up a hill with a lover to watch the moon rise. Each pair of shoes seems to belong to a different version of the same person, and the grandmother's youth is far more varied than her granddaughter can imagine.
The third stanza turns inward. The feet have walked "steady and soft / in a silent room" so long that the floor "still holds the memory of their restless tread." The two adjectives pull against each other. The walking sounds calm, but the floor remembers restlessness. The poem never says what troubled her, and I think that is deliberate. It judges that the inner life of another person is something we can sense but never fully read. Notice, too, that the floor does the remembering. In the sand, the poem gave us fading prints. Here, wood keeps the record.
The last stanza widens the view dramatically. The speaker commands, "And think of what those old feet / have pressed into earth." The verb has changed from *walked* to *pressed*, and it feels heavier and more lasting, as if the feet were giving something to the ground. What follows is a list: "the leaves of long summers, / drifts of dust from skin and stars, / bones and feathers and tears." The repeated "and" makes the list pile up like layers of sediment. Leaves and feathers are light and natural, bones are final, and "skin and stars" puts a human body and the cosmos in the same sentence, as though they were made of the same dust. The poem ends on "tears," the one item that is purely emotional, so the whole sweep of time closes on grief. There is no consoling closing line. The poem simply stops there.
What makes the poem worth reading is its reversal of how we usually see. Children, and often the rest of us, look at an old person and see only the present: grey or fair hair, worn skin, slow feet. Pratt asks us to read those feet as a record of dancing, errands, love, worry and loss. The poem also gently suggests where all this leads, since bones in the earth point towards the end of life. Yet it speaks of this without fear, treating an old body as something that has given a great deal to the world.