Jacques Bertin - Do not talk

Original Title: "Ne parlez pas"
Year: 1972

Do not talk about unknown lands
Do not talk about living another life
Do not stand on your feet to see another world
There is this collar with every move, it strangles you

Talk about the pain of this bitter land
Where crows watch over the seed
Teach yourself to live back pinned down
This knife hurting you let it be a train

Accustom your eyes to a powerful hatred
just like the weapons in the attics piled up
Motionless under the smashed in crates

A hatred like a naked woman, cold and superb
A hatred tenacious and blue, a light
A strength, a running water, a train thrown to the south
A hatred attentive and self-assured
A hatred that knows how to listen, hold back and knows how to wait
The hatred be for those who are accomplices to the crows
Those who possess the word and sell it
The frivolous and the show-offs, the entertainers and their songs
Those who put flowers on your chains, those who flatter you

Listen! The night talks, the night beats
Water fishes, fears, tears, reversed flowers
Listen! Your life is here, opened in two, it's groaning softly
Put the neck on the road and hold back your terror
Talk for your friends, sitting in a circle
Talk for those who drive in the night
Talk as if the whole world was here
Gathered under you eyelids like before the hearth
Talk for me, tell me the name of sorrow
That sob that dampens the windows of the cities
Tell me about the endless staircase and the anger
Tell me your name, your first name and who loves you
And that muzzled singing by the garrulous radios
It shines at the bottom of our pockets like a penkife
It seeps on the walls, it turns the cracks blue

The muzzled singing, the song always, the human's song
It talks about us, it gives us weapons
It sharpens the gates, it opens the knives
We hear it it's the noise of the steps in the subway corridors

It's the appalling breath of the dawn in the stations
That song like a Sunday at the exit of the churches
The wind in the girl's skirts lifted up
The hatred with love mingled, the revived song
It carries us forward of ourselves, it waits, it exults

It talks to you, leaning in your ear
You answer it and your heart beats like a drum
The words go in the carmine vessels of the earth
An arm is resting on your arm that says "Listen !"