A Song for a hero of Mine.

Patrick McGill

Where you were stood at the cruel hiring fair
Among the lads and lassies, for slavery set fair. 
The way of the spailpín, it marked the path you’d take 
Bent your back with labour and left you its long ache.

And so to Bonny Ayrshire where the great  poet laboured.
Just another tattie-howker, a life you never savoured.
Then came the navvy poet with you pick-song and your spade
Lifting stones and words for the songs that you made.

Chorus
The song of the pick, the hammer and the spade,
Rings through the poems, the songs that you made;
So shoulder your rifle, your poverty, your mind,
And weigh in the balance the worth of your kind,
Those you’d not forsaken, the people of the clay 
Those who remember your bright words today.

The tools that you used, we hear their echoes still:
The pick and the shovel, the rifle to kill,
They were vanquished by the pen you wielded for to show
The lives of the lost, the ones you used to know.

And here on the bridge, your name is set in stone,
By the people of the Glenties for a lad of their own,
Who went, the world to conquer, whose words can conquer still —
From the heart and the pen of Patrick McGill.

Chorus
The song of the pick, the hammer and the spade,
Rings through the poems, the songs that you made;
So shoulder your rifle, your poverty, your mind,
And weigh in the balance the worth of your kind,
Those you’d not forsaken, the people of the clay 
Those who remember your bright words today.

— © Frank Callery.


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