Joan Baez ~ NO NOS MOVERAN ON ~ Joan reads a poem by Pablo Neruda ("The Heights Of Macchu Picchu") Here is the English translation:
Arise to birth with me my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these
stone fastnesses,
You will not emerge from
subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise
from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepard,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays --
bring to the cup of this new life
your acient burial sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time it`s tithe of corn
or stone.
Point out to me the rock
on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, lightup the whips
glued to your wounds throughout
the centuries and light the axes
gleeming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry; hours, days, years
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron
the volcanos.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins
and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech,
and through my blood.
-----Pablo Neruda
