The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #118166   Message #2552279
Posted By: mark gregory
29-Jan-09 - 04:46 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: Ernest Antony: new poem discovered
Subject: Lyr Add: Ernest Antony: new poem discovered
Australian historian Rowan Cahill has discovered a new poem written by the forgotten wharfie poet Ernest Antony who publishe a book of poems in 1930

A Poem by Ernest Antony

Yes, you'll remember Anzac and the men who died for you,
The fighting fools who fought to forge their wage slave chains anew.
How often have you told us that their glory shall not fade?
How often have you gloated o'er the sacrifice they made.

While you boasted loud of freedom and your famed democracy,
You schemed to cheat the orphans of far off Gallipoli.
You remember! You remember each year for just a day,
Sons of Anzac and the Anzacs - in a superficial way.

While we heard your voices choking with sentimental slime,
There were things that we remembered, we'll remind you of sometime.
We remember "the depression" and the aftermath of war,
The doles queues and starvation in the "world worth fighting for".

While you weave a wondrous future of a world grown good and wise,
We are not the least forgetting all the trickery and lies.
Nor shall we be forgetting who owes to whom the debt,
Oh, yes, we will remember - when you're trying to forget.

read more about Ernest Antony on the Union Songs website