From every county of old Ireland The stones have come to speak again. Joined together in these four walls They tell the tale of vanished men. One million dead, the Hungerβs harvest A million more fled overseas. The potatoes, on which they depended, Lay rotting in the Irish fields It was a hard death they endured; Their sentence passed by falling yields. The stones cry out, the stones remember the shadows of the hunger slain. They curse the British who dissembled Who showed less mercy than the rain. They cry out loudest for the children; The bairns of that famished land. Their motherβs arms, their only coffin. their sole possession was their names.
This is a poem about the Irish famine memorial in lower Manhattan.