The subtitle tells us the words come from a three-year-old describing her grandmother, though the poem sounds far more worldly than a small child would. Whatever the framing, the speaker looks at an old woman's feet and sees a whole hidden life. The feet have danced alone on spring grass, left prints in wet sand, hurried down a city street on some "dark errand," and climbed a hill with a lover to watch the moon rise. These are places and moments a granddaughter, or even a daughter, could never guess at.
The tone is tender and full of wonder. The speaker isn't pitying the grandmother's age but admiring how much she has lived. The mood darkens a little in the third stanza, where the feet pace a silent room, and the floor "still holds the memory" of their restlessness. The ending widens out to leaves, dust, stars, bones, feathers and tears, as if the feet have touched everything joyful and sorrowful in the world. Old feet become a kind of map of a life.