You left your footprints across my life

I hate to see your photographs:
passing history impossibly frozen,
demanding out-of-date thoughts.

You left your footprints on my life

I hate it when people talk of you:
as if they were asking for my blood
to warm their own false memories.

You left your footprints through my life

I hate it when I find a letter from you:
I read a richness and a loss in them
and am torn apart by myself

You left your footprints in my life

Footprints claim nothing, offer nothing;
they do not ask to be preserved, or to be erased;
they are clean, yet they are there;
where they lead, I have yet to find

You left your footprints across my life

Michael Shepherd

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/your-footprints/