NZ Poetry Shelf
Poetry Shelf celebrates the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2025 Longlist
By Poetry Shelf - Paula Green | Posted: Tuesday Feb 04, 2025
Emma Neale
Spare Change
New to London, maybe I carried the scent Naïve
to the ragged man who shuffled
along the tube train aisle
where I stood gripping the pole
amid the massed bodies of rush hour crush;
each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.
Like the small-town citizen I really was
when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’
I met his gaze then looked down
to see what he wanted to show me:
his forearm split open, swollen,
infection swarming like red wasps.
‘I need some change to get to hospital.
Spare a couple of quid?’
I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank
down over the mind, or how to give a pound
as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash.
Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’
He stalled, his stare a flame held too close,
then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.
‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng
as our train hurtled to the next stop.
A second stranger tapped my shoulder.
‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’
But the fire-swarmed gash.
The pomegranate gasp of it.
The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal.
I’ve seen it. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.
‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy.
Don’t encourage him with money.’
One man, that strung out, he’d self-harm for cash.
Another, that jaded, he’d cauterized compassion.
Decades on, the memory opens
and reopens in the same raw place
so as if I could heal anything
as pernicious as indifference
I am at it again, with the sutures and saline
of these ink-black glyphs:
needle and stitch
needle and stitch.
Emma Neale
Emma Neale’s poetry is rich in connections, experience, visual and aural delights. Like many other poets, her ink is imbued with personal life, with a deep concern about the state of the planet, injustice, humanity. More than anything, Emma writes with heart, her words agile on the line, her poems lingering in the mind as you move though the day.