A Shabbily Dressed Man Poem by Robert R. Railey

A Shabbily Dressed Man

To some of his peers he must have appeared to be less than, but to those of us who'd known him before his fall we believed that he was still a good man
Nowadays, though, it's politically correct to say that a person who's in such a rundown condition must have fallen through the cracks; but to me, that explanation doesn't go quite far enough
For you see, there are still some of us around who remember when that particular gentleman was an excellent third-grade schoolteacher who'd very aptly taught our children
Whatever happened to him is anybody's guess, and whether it was the booze or the drugs or just any one of life's many stresses I doubt seriously if anyone will ever know for sure
Nevertheless, there's one thing that we can all be fairly certain of, he almost certainly never pictured himself as being the poster-boy for disgrace
So to all of us who have never had the misfortune of having to sleep under a bridge it seems to me that the most charitable thing for us to do would be to give him some aid
However, I'm not saying that we should just up and give him a whole lot of cash for we all know he would most likely just drink it all up; and yet, we might somehow find a way to show him a little kindness