A reinterpretation of the Poem, Se Te Disserem, by José Afonso, Portuguese poet and singer-songwriter by Diniz Borges

If they tell you a gorilla carried your sister
out of the burning circle,
do not kneel before the dead aperture
of the mailbox.

Interrogate the formula passed to you—
that fragile cosmology of equality—
where bears rehearse their fall
on the obedient grass
and never arrive.

They alone know how weight
consents to flight.
The rest of us are granted breath:
to laugh,
to cry out,
to enter the world
unfinished.

Break the horoscope that trained your blood.
History waits, unbaptized,
to be seen
for the first time.

You—
centaur of the threshold,
hooves sunk in archive and dust,
torso braided from muscle and chant,
claws coiled with centuries—
your mouth still remembers
the grammar of weapons.
Choose song.

Do not mock those gathered at the water’s margin:
they are citizens of struggle,
and the river keeps their names.

At the fair—kilometer seventeen—
where laurel multiplies
and virtue drowns
in amphorae of water,
laughter is a broken medicine.

Grow as trees grow:
not enthroned,
not suspended,
but loosened from the stem,
answering gravity,
faithful to earth.