On Seeing the Footprints of the Hominins at Laetoli by Patrick Deeley

We did what you must have done

nearly four million years ago –

followed in each other’s footsteps. 

Maybe, as with us, your fun

sprang from a simple game falling into

place.  Or did you suspect

the ground you walked on

of hiding a double-cross?  We know

that, muddied by raindrops,

the volcanic ash hardened

to make fossils of your ‘stay in a row’.

And though the trackway stops

about seventy steps into its run,

from it we can construe

your bipedal stride as the prototype

of our own, even how one

of you may have carried an infant, so

much suggested by the dip

to the left side.  Our recreation

as children was the danger of Callows

quicksand, snag-grass trip,

sump and slide.  We’d lean 

in over the well, hand-cup its cold flow,

go home through a landscape

that, being spongy and sodden,

would thwart your attempts to show

we walked here; we made a shape.

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Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea, County Galway.  He is the recipient of many awards for his writing and his tenth collection of poems, ‘Keepsake’, was published by Dedalus Press in 1924.