Gold cannot quench thirst,
the driving effects only make dry mouths worse.
The ingestion of Gold cannot sustain the body,
the insoluble mineral only perpetuates hunger's curse.

Drowned in the pits poverty
eyes glossed over by the allure
A pitiful kings ransom – six dollars a day
golden promises paving the way for
human exploitation in the name of mineral extraction

To starve in the stranglehold hold of poverty?
To suffocate under the material weight of the world?
To suffer above or be swallowed below?
As avarice floods the desperate mind
torrents of mud flood the gimcrack mines.

Foreign speculators act as black market
sorcerers waving imperial wands.
Chinese move in with machine precision
raising the stakes, razing the topsoil.
Invading anglos leave locals no choice:
weapons sought to level the playing field
against the white man's wealth.

Local police bribed to play the blind-eye.
Clandestine concessions,
retroactive legalization,
blurring the boarders between
legitimate enterprise and illegal excavation.

Children sifted from the school systems
books buried in the murk,
education pawned from the immediate payoff

Isolated communities exposed and exploited.
Towns and farms flooded with toxic filth bi-products,
mercury, cyanide, and lead
seep into the limited water supply,
ingested by the fish, consumed by the people:
Human greed poisoning our innocence,
altering our very DNA.

Lives lost in the pursuit of poverty's
escape route, Broken bodies,
severed villages,
a single flake of beauty,
a single pate of food.

Gregory Allen Uhan

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/golden-graves-of-ghana/