A man sees a woman with a baby and a sign asking for alms, and instead of acting he starts to think. That small delay is the whole poem. In "Moral Dilemmas 4", Mike Stone never tells us whether the speaker gives anything. He lets us listen to the speaker's mind instead, and the longer it runs, the less the question seems to be about coins at all. The number in the title hints at a series of such dilemmas, but this one stands well enough alone.
The construction is simple and deliberate. The opening lines are flat statements of fact: "I'm walking along the street. / I see a young and pretty woman." The one formal word is "alms", slightly old-fashioned and almost biblical, which quietly places an ordinary pavement scene inside a long moral tradition. After that, the grammar changes and almost everything becomes a question. Most stanzas are a single line, so each thought sits alone in white space, like a hesitation on the pavement. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from repetition: more than a dozen lines begin "What if", and the phrase pulls the poem forward like a tic the speaker cannot stop.
The questions escalate in three stages. The first is arithmetic. "How much should I give her?" becomes "Two? Five? Ten? A hundred? A million?", a list that climbs until it turns absurd. The speaker is trying to turn compassion into a sum. His regret that he didn't bring "enough spare change for everyone in need" from his hotel is funny, and it also suggests (judging by that word "hotel") that he is a visitor who hoped generosity could be settled in advance, like packing for a trip.
The second stage is more uncomfortable. The speaker imagines the person asking might be an old lady, a man "who doesn't smell very good", someone "deformed", a woman in a burka. These are the things that might make giving harder, and he admits them with unsettling honesty. The "What if" framing lets him say ugly things at arm's length. The sharpest line is "What if the infant grows up to be a terrorist?" The baby at the start of the poem was the easiest object of pity, and now fear has seeped into that picture too.
The third stage drops money altogether. A request for "the time of day" shows that need can be small and free to meet. A woman who is "smartly dressed and self-confident" challenges the speaker's picture of who deserves help. Then comes "What if she asks me for my love?" The refrain "What if it's not enough?" appeared earlier about cash. When it returns after the question about love, the words are identical but much heavier. Next to "What if I don't have any to give?", it is the most exposed line in the poem.
Then Stone deflates the tension with a domestic joke: "What if it all belongs to my wife?" The laugh doesn't last, because it also suggests that the speaker's love is already committed elsewhere. The final line, "What if it's infinite?", is deliberately slippery. "It" could be the need, the demand, or the love itself. If need is infinite, no gift will ever be enough and guilt never ends. If love is infinite, the speaker's fear of having none to give was wrong all along. The poem stops before choosing.
What makes the piece worth reading is that it refuses to behave like a tidy philosophy exercise. The title promises a classroom puzzle, but what we get is a person stuck on a street, and the speaker never reaches into his pocket. Readers may recognise the trap he falls into: endless questioning can become a polite way of not acting. The plain language and dry humour make the poem easy to enter, but it leaves us wondering how many of our own "what ifs" are really excuses.