‘Dance the Guns to Silence’: some Business and Human
Rights in verse
Dr Jolyon Ford
Associate Professor of Law, Australian National University
November 2018
II.
Supply Chain
In these rooms where dull heat
squats,
We sprawl and watch the shared
screen flicker
Scenes from your world, worlds
apart:
Track the thin truth that ties
us together.
Do you ever just lie awake at
night
And feel the ways our lives are
close?
What becomes of the traces of
our sweat,
In that bright world the camera
shows?
What scent of humanity lingers
there,
(It is a small world, after
all)?
Persistent and intimate, perhaps
we share
A story or secret, something
small.
Bits of you come to us in waves,
Lying here watching the things
you do.
Yet traces of me linger in your
days,
Woven in the things we make for
you.
I wake unrested and wait to
wash,
We cannot leave this place.
Too tired to care where all this
goes,
To think of blame, or of
consequence.
You are still out there
somewhere, doing
Whatever it is People do with
Life.
The myriad things that fill your
days
Tease our dreams through hot
still nights.
The thread that weaves us does
not bind,
The link does not connect;
The traces of me in space and
time,
The little hope that’s left.
Stains in the hidden lining remain,
Shame too abstract to make a
mark.
Something too faint to keep you
awake,
Weeps unheard in this squalid
dark.
The folly of our tele-dream:
To think we thought you somehow
near.
For your Things we gave our
self-esteem,
For such a small world, truly far.
Singapore, 13 October 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment