Homage to Morente

When I listen to Morente I know what I must do When I listen to Morente I don't know what to do When I listen to Morente My life becomes too shallow To swim in I dig but I can't go down I reach but I can't go up When I listen to Morente I know I have betrayed The solemn promise The solemn promise that justified All my betrayals When I listen to Morente The alibi of my throat is rejected The alibi of my gift is overthrown With six impeccable threads of scorn My guitar turns away from me And I want to give everything back But no one wants it When I listen to Morente I surrender to my feeble imagination Which itself has surrendered long ago To the Great Voice of the Taverns And the Families and the Hills When I listen to Morente I am humbled but not humiliated I go with him now Out of the darkness of what I could not be Into the darkness of the song I could not sing The song that hungers for an earthquake The song that hungers for religion Then I hear him begin the great ascent I hear Morente's Aleluya His thundering murderous serene Aleluya I hear it rise to the impossible occasion And pierce the ordinary ambiguities With the sharpened horns Of his own inconceivable ambiguities His cry his perfect word pitched against The baffled contradictions of the heart Wrestling them embracing them Strangling them with a jealous conjugal desperation And he hangs it there beneath his voice Above all the broken ceilings The disappointed sky His voice escaped from the mud of hope And the blood of the throat And the strict training of the cante And he hangs it there The Kingdom of Morente Which he does not enter as Morente But as the great impersonal anointed Voice Of the Taverns and the Families and the Hills And he takes us there By the bleeding finger by the throat by the soiled lapel Takes what's left of us To his Kingdom the Kingdom of Poverty he himself established The only place we want to be Or ever wanted to be Where we can breathe the childhood air The unborn air Where we are nobody at last Where we cannot go without him Long live Enrique Morente Long live the Family Morente The dancers the singers The disciples of the Taverns and the Families and the Hills