Wednesday, 28 November 2018

Business and Human Rights in Verse: Poem 2

This is the second of three attempts to approach 'business and human rights' slightly differently (for a law academic), in verse. The first attempt (previous post) was 'Big Data'. The third attempt (next week's post) is 'Extractive'.

‘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

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