Diamond (positive view)

Look at that stone!
Such beauty from
a minute entity,
Marvelous diamond.

Admired far more than its inferior siblings,
an eternity of churning under earth
in the dark depths and black abyss;
uncovered in a distant world
and sold into this place,
worked to wonder by professional hands until
Perfection.

Direct peripheries,
straight and sharp
flawless throughout,
as if a star were captured and concealed within,
to shine away forever
in such pure glory.

Splendor in white streaks
every which way,
the shimmer of the surface
and wonder within,
it glistens like that distinctive glint
in the eye of one lost in love.
There is nothing more pure than this.

Diamond (negative view)

Look at that rock!
Its beauty is foul and infected,
immersed in red wine
poured from the veins of angels.

Law is lost on Ivory Coast,
violence resounds throughout the hillsides,
echoing over valleys and on Atlantic shores,
Small and calm villages by day are transformed
into blazing torches by the revolutionaries in the night.
Men, women, children,
slaughtered along with the sheep and pigs.
Terror.

Sparkling mineral is leeched from underground,
The diamond mines are the financial springs for this poor nation
where the government cannot even supply its own forces.
Native men are made slave in their own homeland,
their souls burnt and broken into shards of coal,
their bodies into ash,
until they become too worn for work,
and then they are discarded by knife or sword,
staining the ivory scarlet and the diamonds crimson with blood.

Into the world these wondrous marvels are distributed,
covered in blood of man.
Surely the stones must cackle at the eyes that admire,
so ignorant and oblivious
to the atrocities performed by their own kind,
but now, mounted upon halos
and placed on hands,
perhaps this is not so pure after all.