A Gente Não Lê

Oh, lord of the underworld
How dark it goes inside us
Praying the rosary in the late afternoon
Just to ward off loneliness
And praying to God to keep us
Trusting our fate in His hands

What's the use of knowing the tides
The fruits and the sowings
Addressing the tasks informally
Understanding the land and the animals
Speaking the dialect of the earth
Knowing its body by the signs

And the rest we misunderstand
Spell out, sign with a cross
Not seeing the furtive figures
Plotting against us behind the light

Oh, lord of the underworld
How dark it goes inside us
We die soon after birth
With eyes full of marshes
Passing knowledge from mouth to mouth
With proverbs that remain in slang

What good is this purity to us
Without reading, we become flint
Loneliness stirs deep down
Sitting on the doorstep
Listening to the noises of the world
And understanding them in our own way

Carrying the superstition
Of being small, being nobody
And not breaking the tradition
That comes from our grandparents