The Gentleman Of The Road Poem by Stephen Harris

By his bedside, the audience sat or paced about
the single mattress of the dying man.
Dying, yes, but maybe already dead.
Though few cared for this gentleman of the road,
As he lay on the damp pavement, beneath the railways arch.

But I cared and watched, with the peering eyes of a bus,
The slow stirrings of this middle-aged soul.
A shadow no doubt of his former self,
That now kneeled as if in prayer. Shaking his world
In a ritual common, he rose from his death bed

Till before me stood the apparition of a man.
A protagonist of unknown making,
rising from the wings to shyly take the stage.
His white sheet donned became the senators toga,
A Mother Theresa, his own covering of shame.

Once held in swaddling cloths but squeezed in love the tighter
This man, still a child though clothed and unkempt
Devoid of all hope and on bitter path.
Now invisible and largely forgotten.
Needing to be held aloft from his cot and loved again.