Notes To The Future - Patti Smith

Notes To The Future - Patti Smith (帕蒂·史密斯)
Listen my children and you shall hear
The sound of your own steps
The sound of your hereafter
Memory awaits and turns to greet you
Draping its banner across your wrists
Wake up arms
Delicate feet
For as one to march the streets
Each alone each part of another
Your steps shall ring
Shall raise the cloud
And they that will hear will hear
Will hear voice of the one
And the one and the one
As it has never been uttered before
For something greater yet to come
Then the hour of the prophets
And their great cities
For the people of Ninevah
Fell to their knees
Heeding the cry of Jonah
United
Covering themselves in sackcloth and ashes
And called to their god
And all their hearts were as one heart
And all their voices were as one voice
God heard them and his mind was moved
Yet something greater will come to pass
And who will call
And what will they call
Will they call to God
The air
The fowl
It will not matter if the call is true
They shall call and this is known
One voice and each another
Shall enter the dead the living flower
Enter forms that we know not
To be felt by sea
By air
By earth
And shall be an elemental pledge
This is our birthright
This is our charge
And we have given over to others
And they have
Not
Done
Well
And the forests mourn
The leaves fall
Swaddling babes watch and wonder
As the fathers of our spirit nations
Dance in the street in celebration
As the mountains turn pale from
Their nuclear hand
And they have
Not
Done
Well
Now my children
You must overturn the tables
Deliver the future from material rule
For only one rule should be considered
The eleventh commandment
To love one another
And this is our covenant across your wrist
This offering is yours
To adorn adore
To bury
To burn
Upon a mound
To hail
To set away
It is merely a cloth
Merely our colors
Invested with the blood of the people
All their hopes and dreams
Our flag
It has its excellence
Yet it is nothing
It shall not be a tyranny above us
Nor should god
Nor love
Nor nature
Yet we hold as our pleasure this tender honor
That we acknowledge the individual
And the common ground formed
And if our cloth be raised and lowered
Half mast
What does it tell us
That an individual has passed
Is saluted
And mourned by his countrymen
This ritual extends to us all
For we are all the individual
No unknown
No insignificant one
Nor insignificant labor
Nor insignificant act of charity
Each has a story to be told and retold
Which shall be a glowing thread
In the fabric of Man
And the children shall march
And bring the colors forward
Investing within them
The redeeming blood
Of their revolutionary hearts