A meeting

This poem is a postscript to the poem 'Felix' which I wrote many years ago. Felix was a tramp.He keeps returning .yearly.


Corrugated walls and rusting nails
doorless, windowless cold and chill
as any Christmas Day in December.
Was he a woods man  tending
the smoulder  of charcoal beneath
a lid of sods, a manger for his
being many years ago?

Felix-of-the-street,
pram and tyreless wheels,
following since childhood days.
A herring-bone-coat fraying
with sun and rain and snow.
Was the wilderness the same read
at Sunday school.Your eyes were blue
and long your hair and grey,
you left a manger derelict,  sad,
iron corrugations in the wood,
the wood I call my own
to share with a dog called Jack.

Have you gone to the wildness
of the wilderness, sand and sun.
Elijah? and I did not know.
Cardboard  case and shuffle-shoes
were they your Cross?
Wrote of you many times ago
memories each day, to
feel your presence.

Old man, long called Felix
so long it seems so long.
Was that your name?
Must not say goodbye.
Where shall we meet? . . . .
The wildness of the wilderness,?
space and time, time and space
questions asked and answered.