WHEN THE TOILER'S DAY IS DONE
Oh when the long workdays are over, and the
Big Boss gives me my pay,
I hope it wont be hell-fire, as oft the parsons
say,
I hope I won't rot in
purgatory
But bask by your throne of glory.
Look at my face, dust soiled, sun dried; look
at my calloused hands;
The marks of a man who wore a yoke, and made
a stand.
A foot soldier who fought
in a foreign war for God and country,
Killing the heathen
Buddhists, to keep my country free.
I've worked for greedy bastards, big-bellied, proud,
and rich;
I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I died like a dog in the ditch.
I've used the strength Thou's given me, from toil I did not shirk,
For threescore years I labored--on Sunday I did not work.
And now, with age I am broken and bent, twisted
and scared;
Then into the street like a rag, discarded.
Oh lord, I know my sins
are many, for oft I've played the fool:
Women, whiskey, and
cards, they made me the devils tool;
Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a
harlot's purse,
And out with the guys blottoed, that was my
stupid curse.
Then back with an axe
to the woods, broke to the mines or mills;
Down in the damp cold
muck, hung over, alone with the chills.
I drilled at the hard coal-face, I dug in
the three-foot seam,
Been pinned by a ceiling rock, while hearing
my buddies scream,
In summers I've felled
Your pines, and pit mined in North Saskatchewan,
My winters spent hughing
in the mines of Flin Flon,
I hurled Your
forests down, polluted with ore tailings Your streams--
I made material
wealth for others to live their dreams--
Cutting your virgin forests, leaving the ground stripped bare,
And bulldozing away
hillsides, to get at metals rare,
Blasting the rocks
to the ore-bed, and laying roads through glens:
A dumb beast of burden,
a tool for the greed of some men.
Who lived without running water, in a squalid company sty.
I, the primitive toiler, was doomed to work till I die,
No sense to save my
wages, no brainier than a kid:
A man who could barely
read, doing his masters bid.
God, if I didn't do the job, another would take my place;
Better to toil and pay my way, then live under a bridge in disgrace.
This world of mine has
forces, forces greater than mine;
But I always carried
Your book, but rarely had the time.
I prayed for a Christian woman, and the caress of a loving wife,
But they're none in the camps up north; a lonely and loveless life--
A brute, who was yoked
to labor, ladies were too far above.
All I knew were sluts,
thus I longed for love.
Though raised as a guttersnipe, I would have been mannered and mild
If fate had given a wife to treasure, and smiles and hugs of a child--
But I came from an ill-mannered
lot, not from a family grand.
Lord, I filled my earthly
duties, toiled in Thy northern lands;
I have neither abused nor cheated others; I've done my bloody best.
My long, long shift is over, so have I passed Your test?
Based
on The Song of the Wage Slave, in Call of the Yukon, Robert W. Service.
Service, a World War I Canadian veteran who went from drifter to the most read poet of the 20th century,
a peoples poet. His version was one of the poorest in that slim volume; and like
mine, many of his lines didnt scan well. Service simply failed to develop the
topic, though he has a developed social conscience; I filled this elision. There
is little left of Services poem other than form.
Country
Joe Mc Donald (Country Joe & the Fish) set a collection of his antiwar poems to music in the 70s. Call of the Yukon, still in print, is his most entertaining collection. A couple of those poems are in nearly all high school literature books.
I
have read his entire collected works in print.
