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