‘Dance the Guns to Silence’: some Business and Human
Rights in verse
Dr Jolyon Ford
Associate Professor of Law, Australian National University
November 2018
III.
Extractive
They came at night. It matters
not,
What they did exactly, it does not
matter.
Let us not try say what they
took or did:
The gun will serve the highest
bidder.
Across the valley the rotors’
throb
Tells us he comes to see the
mines.
Beneath the ridge the scarred
land drops
To where we sit and wait in
lines.
The low hills crouch, they have
given up.
The land is beaten down.
It too has learned this will
only stop
When all sign of struggle is
gone.
There is no dawn that brings
them home,
No song of comfort sung.
They exist only if we remember
them,
When all is said, and all is
done.
From the camp we hear the shift
bells ring,
This is not a place for
dreaming.
You will not hear our voices
sing,
But nor will you hear the
screaming.
In this rich earth, a richer
dust concealed,
Though we dig, it is not for
truth.
Grass in the breeze where the
scar has healed,
Mocks their futile defiant
youth.
Some system did all this for
gain,
And made our rivers burn.
It took our very soil away
And so our soul in turn.
And so here now we that remain
Mine the seams of lessons never
learned,
Listen to the scoured land in
its pain,
Wait without hope for their
ghosts’ return.
Cambridge
MA, 31 Oct. 2018
