Notes To The Future

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