Patti Smith - Notes to the Future lyrics

Listen my children and you shall hear The sound of your own steps The sound of your hereafter Memory awaits and turns to greet you Draping its banner across your wrists Wake up arms Delicate feet For as one to march the streets Each alone, each part of another Your steps shall ring Shall raise the cloud And they that will hear will hear Will hear voice of the one And the one and the one As it has never been uttered before For something greater yet to come Then the hour of the prophets And their great cities For the people of Ninevah Fell to their knees Heeding the cry of Jonah United Covering themselves in sackcloth and ashes And called to their god And all their hearts were as one heart. And all their voices were as one voice. God heard them and his mind was moved. Yet something greater will come to pa**. And who will call? And what will they call? Will they call to God? The air? The fowl? It will not matter, if the call is true. They shall call and this is known. One voice and each another Shall enter the dead, the living flower, Enter forms that we know not. To be felt by sea, By air, By earth And shall be an elemental pledge. This is our birthright. This is our charge. And we have given over to others. And they have not done well And the forests mourn. The leaves fall. Swaddling babes watch and wonder As the fathers of our spirit nations Dance in the street in celebration As the mountains turn pale from Their nuclear hand And they have not done well Now my children You must overturn the tables Deliver the future from material rule For only one rule should be considered The eleventh commandment To love one another And this is our covenant across your wrist This offering is yours To adorn, adore To bury To burn Upon a mound To hail To set away It is merely a cloth, Merely our colors, Invested with the blood of the people All their hopes and dreams. Our flag It has its excellence Yet it is nothing It shall not be a tyranny above us Nor should god Nor love Nor nature Yet we hold as our pleasure this tender honor That we acknowledge the individual And the common ground formed And if our cloth be raised and lowered Half mast What does it tell us? That an individual has pa**ed Is saluted And mourned by his countrymen. This ritual extends to us all. For we are all the individual. No unknown. No insignificant one Nor insignificant labor Nor insignificant act of charity Each has a story to be told and retold Which shall be a glowing thread In the fabric of Man And the children shall march And bring the colors forward Investing within them The redeeming blood Of their revolutionary hearts.