Small Change Poem by Rory Hudson

I hear it every day
at that street corner
where the morning crowds congregate,
waiting for the lights to turn green:
“Any small change, mate? ”
His name is John
and he is homeless -
or so, at least, proclaims
a battered scrap of brown cardboard
strategically positioned
beside where he kneels on hard pavement
as if in prayer, arms supplicating outwards
and deferentially uplifted a little
to the few who may notice him
and think of him as something more
than a fixture in their lives,
a burden they must bear
(and this, indeed, is true,
for has it not been said and decreed
that the poor are always with us?)

And so John has placed
a dull blue cap
beside his scrap of cardboard,
and a few coins lie in it
desolately, not knowing altogether
what to do with themselves.
It seems their existence
has no real purpose.

“Any small change, mate? ”
The voice seems disconnected
from the face that has been beaten
into the submission from which he now appeals
to the tribunal of the multitude,
expressionless, eyes not venturing
to meet the eyes of his judges
to make a moment
of any consequence.
I throw him
some crumbs of my life;
I throw him
some scraps of my dreams
from which he will perhaps weave for himself
some multicoloured patchwork, untidy and disarticulated,
to use as a blanket against life.

I would pass on -
but find my path blocked
by a large puddle of cold water on the footpath.
In it
John is reflected,
and in this inversion of the world
he towers over
skyscrapers of bleak glass and steel
reaching to a rainy sky.

“Any small change, mate? ” -
but in that moment
a hurried pedestrian,
heedless of the welfare of his well-pressed trousers,
has stepped abruptly into the puddle -
water splashes out
and ripples quite destroy
the inverted illusion
that in this world
John may loom larger in the minds of men
than structures of steel in a cold sky.