I saw a photo on my desktop,
one of five hundred that scroll around
at thirty second intervals.
It showed a quirky group
of happy little curios
taken through the window of some shop
I’d passed along my travels.
Was it in Paris? Or perhaps Turin?
(Both places where I wandered, window-shopping.)
Maybe Zagreb, or even Istanbul?
Or Venice, I wondered,
as a sense of desperation overcame me.
I found the original,
taken on an ancient Nokia,
no useful information.
The only date, the fourth of May,
the last time it was edited,
but not when it was taken.
That day I was in Mostar,
not a place, as I recall
with many antique shops.
It must have been
one of the twenty five (or so)
locations where I’d been
before I got there.
Bologna? Split?
Somewhere in Brittany
or Northern Spain?
How could I search
eight thousand photos
in over two hundred folders?
‘At least’, I thought
‘I can write a poem about it’.
But I was wrong.
Southsea Storytellers 