Do Tempo

Time keeps ticking
My pagan destiny
I sip on the mate
As dawn breaks
While I hear crackling
The old live embers
In this primitive ritual
Always waiting, waiting...

It's the fate of the tapejara
We are heirs to it
Pumping the yellow bar
Of the day when it clears up
Feeling the mind racing
In the paths that time traces
I cover myself in smoke
And look at the veteran time
Year in, year out
It stays, we pass by

Who saw time pass
There are many who think
But there's a big difference
It doesn't move from its place
We who live walking
As if fulfilling a ritual
It's the fate of mortals
It's the path of mortals
Walking and walking, nothing more
Against time, always the same.

Time is someone who remains
Mysterious, impenetrable
In another unchanging plane
Unknown to destiny
That's why we age
Without seeing how we aged
When we feel it happened
And after it happened
We talk about lost time
That really was never ours.

Complicated thought
Of the Indian who drinks mate
Pumping in the round and a half
From present to past
Then I follow absorbed
Always mate in hand waiting
The end of the road is the hut
The unknown of the eternal
But the hope of winter
Is the return of spring.

Dreams are seasons
In our human minds
Often profane
We seek compensations
In reality, the reasons
Where we find a way out
In this lost race
That we run against time
Since, in truth, we don't know
What will be beyond life.

Within the philosophies
Of the Confucius gauchos
Tamers, carters
That I heard on cold nights
I think the string of days
Is not worth counting
And I even come to think
Looking at the embers close
That life is an open credit
That must be used.

Saving days for the future
Is always a great folly
The interest is always old age
And what good is this interest
If to the Indian with a hard jaw
Time tames in the siege
Spending is the best remedy
On the uphill and downhill
Because in the account of life
An average balance is of no use!