Page:Poems for Workers - ed. Manuel Gomez (1925).djvu/14

 The Legacy.

By

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;