Poems for Workers (Gomez 1925)/The Legacy
The Legacy.
By James Connolly.
Connolly is known to all Irishmen as the leader of the Irish Citizen Army, the soul of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, in which Connolly lost his life. He was not only a fighter for Irish independence but also for the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery. He was a revolutionary Marxist, editor of the famous journal, "The Workers' Republic." This poem is inscribed to his son.
"Thy father is a poor man," mark well what that may mean,
On the tablets of thy memory that truth write bright and clean,
The father's lot it was to toil from earliest boyhood on,
And know his latent energies for a master's profit drawn.
Or else, ill-starred, to wander round and huckster-like to vend
His precious store of brain and brawn to all whom fate may send
Across his path with gold enough to purchase labor's power,
To turn it into gold again, and fructify the hour
With sweat and blood of toiling slaves like unto us my son;
Aye, through our veins since earliest days, 'tis poor man's blood has run. . .
Treasure ye in your inmost heart this legacy of hate
For those who on the poor man's back have climbed to high estate,
The lords of land and capital, the slave lords of our age,
Who of this smiling earth of ours have made for us a cage. . .
And howsoe'er you earn your wage, and wheresoe'er you go,
Be it beneath the tropic heat or 'mid the northern snow,
Or closely pent in factory walls, or burrowing in the mine,
Or scorching in the furnace hell of steamers 'cross the brine. . .
The men and women of your class, tell them their wrongs and yours—
Plant in their hearts that hatred deep that suffers and endures,
And treasuring up each deed of wrong, each scornful word and look,
Inscribe it in the memory, as others in a book.
And wait and watch through galling years the ripening of time,
Yet deem to strike before that hour were worse than folly—crime!