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From the northeast of Brazil
Comes a poet of humble birth
Who sings the literature of the cordel
With all its beauty and its worth
To tell of the cruel fanaticism,
The wicked act of terrorism
That bollixed up the earth.

An anthropologist Americana
Educated and genteel
Visited my humble casa
With an invitation of goodwill
To visit the poetry gathering and City Lore
To present our national folklore
And represent Brazil.

Candace told me, Azulão,
I'd like to extend an invitation
To visit the city of New York.
That's no cause for aggravation
For we will find a way
To pay your meals and transportation
And give you great caché....

At the festival I played viola,
My cordel poems I declaimed,
And through my remarkable success
Received my modicum of fame.
And I saw their beautiful city
So tall, majestic, and pretty
Before I returned from where I came.

It was on the 10th of April
Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine
That on my visit to New York
I visited the Towers, stood in line
To rise above that tall skyline
On that edifice so divine
America's most famous shrine.

To the 110th floor of the famous Towers
I was graciously allowed
To see the world from that elevation
So high above the crowds.
I saw below me vast terrain
As if I was in an airplane
Or floating on the clouds.

From her enormous terrace
I gazed on that immensity
And looking in one direction
I could see far as New Jersey
And occasionally from there on high
I glimpsed an airplane whizzing by
Doubling the intensity.

I thought to my own self
In that hour of my contemplation
As I stood atop those mighty twins
Imagining for a second the devastation.
What if an airplane with its acceleration
Slammed into the Towers - the devastation
Would kill whole segments of the population,
Shake this mighty nation.

Two years and five months following
My visit, that seems so apropos -
Those two tall towers were pummeled
Exploded, crumbled below
Slammed by planes filled up with fuel
In an action hideously cruel
As we all watched blow by blow.

Thousands of innocent people died,
Left families whose tears and cries
Will never ever stop flowing -
Only with death will their grief die,
Wives, and husbands will never be consoled,
For loved ones never to grow old
In agony died carbonized....

George Bush who governs much of the world
Began to holler and to rave
With his missiles and his bombs
Went after bin Laden in his caves.
Members of the Taliban
They surrendered, died or ran,
A mountaintop their grave.

But they only wasted weapons
As they tried to cleanse the rotten
They dropped so many bombs
They killed so many downtrodden,
Afghan children, women spent,
Indefensible and innocent,
But they never got bin Laden.

All that American power
All that carnage and that drama
Dropping bombs like a rain shower
Inflicting so much trauma
They destroyed half of Afghanistan
Decimated the Taliban
But never got Osama.....

In truth, both sides are criminals,
Terrorists and presidents,
One brings terror to America,
The other to the Orient.
Both bent on retribution
Ending with the execution
Of the helpless and the innocent.

I'm not in favor of terror
Of death and devastation
But what goes around comes around
People get their compensation.
Remember what the U.S. did to the Japanese
When an atom bomb brought to its knees
A powerful, sovereign nation....

The promises of God
Are always true - they never err.
Wickedness shall be vanquished from the earth
Such evil never reoccur.
God in his wisdom has professed
An end to all this craziness
And will all this villainy deter.

Hundreds of thousands lost their lives
As the flames of hate were fanned
In an act that was inhuman
Its evil so well planned
So many dead or in pain
As the terrorists left a blood red stain
Upon the American land.

-Translated from Portuguese by Steve Zeitlin

*Note from translator: This is not a word for word translation, but rather, is intended to convey the essence of each stanza and to preserve the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the cordel poem.

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