Cidadão [English translation]

Can you see that building, young man?

I helped them build it up

It was a time of afflictions

I had to take four buses

Two to get here and two to go back home

Now, after it's already finished

I look up and get dizzy

But then a suspicious citizen comes

And asks me if I'm there gazing at the building

Or if I’m there to rob people

My Sunday has been lost

I’ll go home saddened

It makes me want to drink

And to raise my boredom

I can’t even look at the building

That I helped to build

Can you see that school, young man?

I have also worked there

I almost got hurt there

I set the mortar

I helped people plaster its walls

My innocent daughter

Came to me, so happy

Telling me that she would register there

But then a citizen comes and tells me

'Poor children can't study here!'

Saying that she can't study there

This pain ached more

Why did I leave the North 1?

I began to ask myself

There the drought made us suffer,

But I could eat

What I planted

Can you see that church, young man?

Where the preacher says ‘amen’?

I build the bell and the clappers of it

My hand got full of calluses

I’ve worked there as well

There it was worth

There there are kermises2 and the novena3

And the preacher lets me get in

It was there where Christ told me

‘Man, stop being such a fool

Don’t let yourself be frightened

It was I who created the Earth

I filled the rivers with water, I made the mountains

I didn’t let anything lack

Now the man has created wings

And I can’t enter

Most of the houses

It was I who created the Earth

I filled the rivers with water, I made the mountains

I didn’t let anything lack

Now the man has created wings

And I can’t enter

Most of the houses

1. Referring to the Brazilian north2. Mass said on the anniversary of the foundation of a church3. An institutional act of religious pious devotion in the Roman Catholic Church

• Artist:Zé Geraldo
• Album:Terceiro Mundo (1979)