School photo: The Jewish school, Warsaw 1929
School photo:
The Jewish school, Warsaw 1929
By Jane Spiro
In the school photo, four rows of children,
boys in white shirts, smiling, smirking, grimacing,
the girls in their tunics with box necks,
neat white collars, preparing for their futures -
still-faced that minute in the lens eye, in between
the fidgeting, failing to sit up straight, pulling
faces, sticking out a tongue, trying to make
teacher laugh, and in the bottom row on the left
there he is, my young-boy father, his face sweet
with life as yet unspent, his dark eyes staring
intensely at the viewer, who knows him now
more than he knows himself - how the shy
half-smile, the straining forward towards the camera,
the black hair cut straight above his eyes,
hold the story of the flight to come, the healer
he is to be, the spouse, the father, not yet known.
The moment is held here, click, before all,
line by line, child by child, scatter
with playground shouts, tugs of war,
hide and seek, empty rooms.
“School Photo” originally appeared in the anthology Intimate Riches in a Little Room (2016)
Jane Spiro is a writer and university teacher living in Oxford and the west country of England. She has published two poetry collections and a novel, as well as books for the teaching of creative writing and poetry. “School Photo” also appears in her new book, Is a Gateway (2018)