The Old Travelling Man

He sat by the campfire the old travelling man reciting a very old lay His eyes were as brown as a ripe Autumn nut and his straggly hair silvery gray A wrinkled old fellow he seemed the worst for wear with wrinkles on his hands and face He travelled with his family in his horse drawn van and he had been to many a place. In the social rank he was not very high but he was a cultured old bloke He liked his dark porter and music and dancing and song and woodbine cigarettes he did smoke So many poets he knew of and one could not but feel amazed at all of the poems he could recite I listened to him when I was a young boy for two or three hours of the night. Though he knew of discrimination like all of his type he never did harbour a grudge He did look at life in a philosophical way he was not one to envy or judge A descendant of those that Cromwell had dispossessed he had travelled on many a road He was a free spirit and he did enjoy the life of the no fixed abode. Back in the mid fifties he was an old man but I still recall him today Long gone to the reaper but I do not know where the bones of the old traveller lay As he sat with his fiddle by the glowing camp fire such beautiful tunes he did play Good memories of childhood we always retain though from the old home we live far away. In my flights of fancy he recites a poem of listening to him I never could tire And as he plays his old fiddle his family they dance around and around the camp fire The travellers horse drawn vans and horses from the roadways long gone and everything changes with time In the early sixties their way of life changed before I had reached my life's prime.