Ancestral
I pick up my antique hand-mirror, sense tears, like a haunt:
small glassy droplets that glint their signal across the years,
channelling my great-great aunt, perhaps:
who never married, nor lived discreetly with a lady companion.
The silver hand-mirror I’ve inherited from her,
its back embossed with slim vines, sun-swollen flowers,
was her one loyal witness to incomprehension,
the unravelling of expectations;
only lamplight patting the lines of her face
like a curious child who tries to learn the workings of time;
the inner enemy of self-criticism
the one cold, imperious lover
from whom she must have had to try and retry
to disguise her bitten mouth bright opium.
Emma Neale is an author and an editor. Her poetry collection, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024) won the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for 2025, the same year she also received the Janet Frame Prize. Her recent novel, Maybe Baby (2026) has just been published by Bateman Books.
