Where to look
Where to look
By Jane Spiro
This museum is a not-museum
where things of no interest
are collected meticulously together in glass cases
labelled with no information
and forming a story of no coherence –
a tired saint rimmed with flaking gold
once propped up against a door,
portrait of an unknown nobody smiling
for no particular reason, a dusty sedan chair,
a bottle shaped as a clown, a room
of stuffed birds shocked to be there-
but the floor is magnificent.
Yes, I would be here, amazed,
for the floor alone.
My feet are threaded on a spider’s web,
a fretted chessboard of light and dark.
The planet is here.
Look under your feet.
Jane Spiro is a poet, academic and language educator based in the UK, with teaching experience in 4 continents of the world. She has published collections of stories for language learners, a novel and many resources to bring creative writing into language classrooms. Her poetry has appeared in journals Rialto, Resurgence, North Stone Review, on the Oxford buses and on local radio and TV, as well as in many anthologies such as Children at War, Having your Cake and Eating it, East of Auden and Conlfuence. Playing for Time is her first full collection, published by Oversteps in 2015.