Did You Dig A Ship Canal With Frankenstein's Tools? Poem by Mark Heathcote

Did you bleed to earn your strawberry limes?
Your three halfpence dreams,
Did you dig a ship canal with Frankenstein's tools?
Did you claw; did you nearly die only to sing?
Burst like a flower that wouldn't hold shop-stored fruit;
To a bough that kissed your hard-pressed lips,
That has no earthly crown no larder hoard
To keep your kith and kin, from the workhouse, door.

Did you sleep six in a huddle of potatoes and dirt?
Dirt in framers outhouse, too small to swing a mouse
Did you too live like a woodlouse?
Bordered up in lodgings too humble to wash a frying pan
Far, far too important even pluck thorns from a dried-up rose.
Did you climb a chimney and then parting
Somehow pop up through the clouds and meet your lord
And that night take your fill of buttered golden corn.

Oh who these days hasn't suffered at the hands of others
Too, greedy to understand the sufferings of others,
Oh who these days, hasn't suffered the same as their fathers
Their mothers their great-grandfathers their grandmothers,
Oh who these days,
Hasn't suffered at the hands of these thieving buggers
Who are happiest when we are furrowed into dust?
Good foundations for them, if they can pay us in mistrust.