Now you know
(June Jordan - Roy Brown)
palestinians in Beirut,
but I didn’t know and nobody told me
and what could I do or say,
anyway?
They said you shot their London ambassador
and when that was not true
they said “so what?”.
They said you shelled
their northern villages
and when UN forces reported
“that was not true”,
because your side of the cease-fire was holding,
they said “so what?”.
They said they simply wanted to carve
a twenty five mile buffer zone,
and then they ravaged your water supplies,
your electricity,
your hospitals,
your schools,
your highways and byways
all the way north to Beirut.
They blew up your homes
and demolished the grocery stores
and blocked the Red Cross
and took away
doctors to jail,
and they cluster bombed
girls and boys,
whose bodies
swelled purple and black
into twice
their original size.
They said something about “never again”
and then they made close to one million
human beings homeless
in less than three weeks
and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men
and your women
and your children.
They said they were victims.
They said you were Arabs.
They called your
apartments and gardens
guerrilla strongholds.
Then they told you to leave,
didn’t you read
the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
Yes, I did know it was the money
I earned as a poet that paid
for the bombs
and the planes
and the tanks
that they used to
massacre your family.
El poema original se titula “Apologies to all the people in Lebanon”
La cantautora Judit Neddermann y el guitarrista Pau Figueres presentan un nuevo álbum conjunto, con doce canciones en castellano, catalán, portugués y francés, grabadas en directo en estudio. Entre ellas, una nueva versión de Vinc d’un poble con Joan Manuel Serrat y temas originales que combinan pop, folk, jazz y música popular brasileña.
El cantautor chileno Patricio Anabalón lanza el single Danza con la participación de Silvio Rodríguez, en una obra producida por Javier Farías y enriquecida con los aportes del Cuarteto Austral, Felipe Candia y otros destacados músicos e ilustradores; en un encuentro generacional de la canción de autor.
El compositor, etnomusicólogo y director teatral napolitano Roberto De Simone ha muerto en Nápoles a los 91 años. Fue autor de La gatta Cenerentola y fundador de la Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. En su Cantata per Masaniello colaboró el grupo chileno Inti-Illimani, en una obra que unió la tradición napolitana con la música latinoamericana.
La cantante catalana Sílvia Pérez Cruz participa con su voz en el nuevo trabajo del compositor Feliu Gasull, donde interpreta varias piezas con orquesta, en un disco que reúne también a Pau Figueres, Josep Pons y la Orquestra del Gran Teatre del Liceu.
La profesora puertorriqueña Limarí Rivera Ríos publica el primer estudio académico interdisciplinario sobre la obra de Silvio Rodríguez, explorando la relación entre canción y poesía, la representación del amor como ética revolucionaria, el discurso racial y el legado de Martí y Guillén.