Landless Voices -> Sights & Voices -> By media -> Poems

English | Português

The Sights and Voices of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST (The Movement of the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil)

Language:

English (mude para Português)

This page:

Emerging culture by media type -> Poems 46 resources (Edited by Else R P Vieira. Translation © Bernard McGuirk.)

    resource: 1 of 46    Next

This resource is also listed in:

Culture: Icons, symbols, and monuments

Author:

Pedro Tierra

Title:

The flag of the MST

With the hands
That plant and reap
With the same hands(1)
That fences break
We weave you

Challenging the winds
Above our heads
We raise you

Flag of land,
Flag of strife,
Flag of life

Flag of freedom!
Sign of freedom
To which we swear:
Oppressors' worlds
O'er your shadows won't be born.

Sign of land
Conquered!
Sign of the fight
And of hope
Sign of life
Multiplied

And when the land returns
To the sons and daughters of the land
It will rest on the shoulders
Of children free
To succeed us!

1 Editor's note: "Fence" relates to the Landless's symbology of barbed wire

Date:

November 2002

Resource ID:

FLAGOFTH813

Anthology of poems
A first-hand selection, unpublished in Brazil and elsewhere. A militant poetics; the social and political importance of the poet-singer (cantador), the construction of a canon of exclusion; the landless woman; the theme of death as life's horizon; the pedagogic project.
Else R P Vieira

		to Queen Mary University Of London welcome page

Landless Voices hosted by the
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
Queen Mary University Of London, UK

Project Director & Academic Editor: Else R P Vieira
Web Site Producer: John Walsh
Web Site created: January 2003
Last updated: July 5th 2016

www.landless-voices.org