LABOUR
Forced, coerced or enslaved,
for survival or faith
remembering
conscripted hoards swarming across
Genghis and Tamerlane’s Asia,
chain-ganged for Europe’s crusades;
for constructing pyramids, Great Walls.
The mass migration of rural peoples
for Victorian industry and child-labour;
mega-projects of road and rail-making
- bridges, dams, tunnels, viaducts.
Perennially, for cheap labour
and wars’ endemic cannon-fodder;
digging for gold, diamonds or coal,
and in Siberian salt mines,
Bangladeshi sweat shops;
Uighurs slaving in cotton plantations
in Xinjiang,
as the stolen children of Africa
before them, from 1513
in the Caribbean and Americas;
with sex and organ-trafficking, people-smuggling,
those escaping disasters and corruption
ever since.
Opium fields in the Mishmi Hills, Pradesh
- Helmand, Chihuahua, Diwaniya;
cocaine trails from Putumayo, Narino
and Cochabamba to Rotterdam
with the concurrent mountains of bodies
from cartel gang-wars
and organized crime
- not to mention, poverty, famine, conflict and disease.
For immigrant seasonal and agency labour
- Mexican, Haitian, Thai, Romanian, Eritrean, Irish, Filipino,
and undervalued minimal-waged work
in agriculture and Care.
Illegal refugees swatting in car-washes,
domestic slavery, construction;
Minorities drudging in Canadian prairie abattoirs;
procurement strategies of HCC countries
not excluded.
Even, presumption-planning
to mine asteroids, the melting Antarctic
and the silver moon
in the insatiable quest for ever more.
Now, for a supposedly virtuous cause,
lithium, graphite, cobalt a premium,
dug by hand, for a toxic pittance
in seething open-cast quarries,
by grace of multi-national greed
and for unthinking consumer indulgence.