August Poetry: Withdrawn

Emma Neale is a Dunedin poet, novelist, editor, teacher. She is a former Robert Burns Fellow, and her writing has won many awards and fellowships. Her most recent poetry collection is Tender Machines.
Withdrawn was one of the poems that Emma featured in her readings for the Poets on Place event in Knox Church in the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival in May.  

Withdrawn

It is not within the scope of this poem
to discuss the failure of successive governments
to address the glaring discrepancies
between all the different weights and shades
of human pain —

but suffice to say that today,
on George Street in Dunedin, 2017,
I saw a thin young man
in a sleeping bag
on top of a flattened cardboard box
with a disposable cup for coins at his side

and he couldn't look up
when he thanked us
for the twelve-pack of fresh bread rolls
we'd had to walk past him to buy —
with our conscience burning holes
in the sleek, fat satin of our well-fed hearts —

and then some big old drunk Sally
came swinging past with her plastic sacks
and as she sang up a rough happiness
she'd scratched together somehow
she knocked his collection cup over
so all the loose change spilled out
with the faint jangle of lock-up keys
and a two dollar coin shot away
like a panicked animal,
light ablaze on its skin

and another man chased it
into the traffic
where a courier van blared its horn
and the pursuer's toe tripped it as it spun
so it seemed to lunge sideways to dodge him
as it plunged through the grill
of a storm drain;
quenched like the flame
of a tiny Excalibur;
small miracle of compassion
withdrawn.