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Victor Jara
Revered poet Victor Jara, who was among many taken to the Santiago stadium after General Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile. Photograph: Patricio Guzman/AP
Revered poet Victor Jara, who was among many taken to the Santiago stadium after General Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile. Photograph: Patricio Guzman/AP

The life and death of Victor Jara – a classic feature from the vaults

This article is more than 10 years old
The Chilean singer Victor Jara was murdered in the country's military coup 40 years ago this week. This classic NME piece from 1975 – taken from Rock's Backpages – tells the tale of his death, and how the coup came to pass

David Bowie, having looked into the black heat of apocalypse, has returned with the mutant truth. From behind a pair of Young Republican specs and a chin borrowed from Barry Goldwater, Bowie tells us how rock'n'roll is "a toothless old hag" and "an embarrassment".

That the very next dance craze will leap suddenly from the belly of America. That it will be called Fascist Domination Of The Western Democracies and the whole thing's real easy once you get the hang of it.

"There will be a political figure," he says, "in the not too distant future who'll sweep this part of the world like early rock'n'roll did. You've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. Then you can get a new form of liberalism. So the best thing that could happen is for an extreme right government to come. It'll do something positive, at least, to cause a commotion in people and they'll either accept dictatorship or get rid of it."

So there you have it.

Bowie, having delivered his prophecy, returns to the mount and waits with sublime indifference while events either confirm the colour of his dreams or show him to be just another Isaiah-fixated nut.

On the other hand, those of us under the alleged firing zone could reasonably ask that Bowie either put up or screw off since there are examples galore of the kind of "political figure" he suggests as a "tidy" solution, none of whom operate with anything like Bowie's sense of artful pragmatism.

In Chile, for example, a fairly orthodox fascist junta has, in two years, wiped out 30,000 of the population, imprisoned another 200,000 and left 22,000 widows and 66,000 orphans; a situation that already hints at fulfilling Bowie's expectations since the operation, under the management of Augusto Pinochet, was actually fired off by a collective comprising the CIA, the State Dept and American business interests.

These three bodies, of course, loom in their peculiarly surreal fashion over the fortunes of much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Vague but nonetheless real confessions as to the extent of US involvement in Chile (such as those made by CIA director William Colby before Congress) still fail to dissipate the "imaginary" quality of the affair.

As a former CIA operative in Europe complained recently: "Nowadays, if Mount Etna erupts, people say it's the CIA."

Let's, though, deal for the time being with how the Chilean junta has bled just one Chilean family – that of Joan and Victor Jara. Joan is a London-born dancer turned teacher who moved out to Chile some 20 years ago with a troupe called the Josse Ballet – in her retrospective opinion, a fairly effete organisation.

"When I met Victor, I was a person shut within a very small world – which is the world, let's say, of dance. And he opened my eyes. He took me out into the world. He made me touch things, see things, feel things, and I understood about Chile for the first time."

Victor used to play guitar and write folk songs. But a soldier chopped his hands with an axe and machine gunned him to death so he doesn't play guitar anymore.

The incident is an example of the wit of a junta that came to power on 11 September, 1973, summarily ending the Popular Unity Government of Salvador Allende.

Victor was an early victim of the coup because he'd ranged himself alongside Chile's working and peasant populations, filling them with incendiary stuff about the history and potency of Chilean lore.

Allende was another early victim for much the same reason. His platform had been one of unbridled reform – land redistribution, nationalisation of major corporations (especially the US-owned copper holdings that account for 80% of the country's foreign earnings), and a radical re-orientation of health, education and housing services.

Allende and his Popular Unity government were already well into their programme when the backlash – stirring first among middle-ranking military officers and growing to include businessmen and the generals – finally, in September, snapped.

Joan: "I think where Chile is different from other Latin American countries is that Chile has an enormously long tradition of organised working-class struggle. There have been workers' massacres and they've got together again and organised themselves and protested and made strikes against the most brutal repression. This goes back to the beginning of the century, this organisation … and it was on this basis that Dr Allende's government was built."

The Jaras met around 1958 when Victor presented himself as a student at one of Joan's dance classes. Joan, by way of a reciprocal nicety, decided to look in on a play Victor had directed. "It was," she says, "the first really honest play I'd seen in Chile. His reality was a Chilean reality. Not an imported one."

Chilean reality of the day started with a population of some 10 million – 3 million of whom packed the shanty towns of Santiago. To the south were the coal, oil and copper fields and vast, largely untrammelled lands lightly farmed by Chile's oligarchic families with mute "aid" from the peasant population. To the north were the abandoned nitrate mines and their attendant townships given up by the British after the discovery of synthetic fertilisers. The Americans were already moving in and everywhere there was the suppressed heat of worker unrest.

Eduardo Frei's Christian Democratic government came to power in 1964 and for a while showed some promise of reform. But, gradually, Frei shelved his revolutionary zeal – eventually swinging right over to yet more repression, this time encompassing open massacres of the peasants.

The New Chilean Song Movement was already launching itself in quiet contemplative spasms. It took its start from a tiny folk club called Pena Los Paras, the lead coming from a woman called Violeta Parra whose life consisted of roaming the Chilean countryside, Woody Guthrie style, collecting songs – and writing a few of her own.

Joan: "The whole movement began to take great strength about 1967 with the formation of Inti-Illamani and Quilapayun. Victor worked with Quilapayun in the first three years of their existence and together with these groups and Victor and Angel and Isabella [Violeta's children] everything was multiplying."

In the universities, too, there was a clamour for change and in 1969 the two movements met head on at Santiago's hitherto reactionary Catholic University where a festival of the New Chilean Song Movement was staged. Curiously enough, it was opened by the rector of the university, a member of Frei's Christian Democratic party, against whom much of the invective of the New Song Movement was being hurled.

Victor won first prize with a song called Prayer To a Labourer, which he performed in the stadium where, four years later, he was to be tortured and shot.

Reading on mobile? Watch a full Victor Jra concert from 1973 here

"This was even before the campaign for President Allende," says Joan. "But now the media were forced to recognise the phenomenon. There was a great deal more access to the media than before. And the songs instead of being sung underground, were already pop for the first time. They were on the radio and they were on the television. The song movement was a tremendous weapon – if you want to say it like that – in the fight to make people aware. It was a tremendous means of communication."

Allende, meanwhile, was launching himself at the highest office in the land, much to the chagrin of US corporate interests who saw his brand of "constitutional Marxism" as the sneakiest brand of Red herring. Opposition was mounted in many forms – sometimes on an informal, almost subliminal, level and elsewhere, as in the case of the eleventh largest corporation in the world, as a deadly earnest crusade.

Subversion In Chile (A Case Study in US Corporate Intrigue In The Third World) reproduces the US corporation ITT's internal memoranda of the day. A deadlock in the September, 1970, election gives ITT some solid ground for optimism. The decision now rests with the Chilean Parliament and ITT is hopeful that a constitutional manouevre dubbed "the Alessandri formula" will merge the Christian democrats and rightist candidate Jorge Alessandri, thereby thwarting Allende at the post. As a safeguard ITT is attempting to prod the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei into "anticipating" (ie promoting) leftist violence – thereby "morally justifying an armed forces intervention for an indefinite period." But Frei will have no part of it.

Plan two is proposed by William Broe, director of the Latin American Department of the CIA. The CIA and ITT will, together with other major US firms, simply bring about the economic collapse of Chile. ITT will be responsible for recruitment, the CIA will handle the rest.

Economic collapse, it is reasoned, will bring Chile to a point of crisis thereby "forcing" Frei and the army to install a military government (a scenario strangely reminiscent of the one immediately proceeding the 1973 coup). But plan two also flops when the Christian Democrats vote, on October 5, to support Allende's candidacy.

On the same day, however, William Merriam, ITT's Washington vice-president, is writing a memo to ex-CIA operative John McCone, now a member of the ITT board, in which he speaks of approaches which "continue to be made to select members of the armed forces in an attempt to have them lead some sort of uprising … no success to date".

There is also the patently ridiculous. A memo sent to Merriam by a senior vice president.

Subject: "The Chilean candidate".

"Physically Allende is short, red-faced, curly-haired and tough talking. In real life he doesn't look nearly so young and attractive as in those recent photographs appearing in the New York Times."

Joan: "We'd been watching TV when a friend called us and said Allende had won. We didn't really believe it. We went down to the Students' Federation in the centre of town. Masses of people had gathered. People were arriving from the shanty towns, coming with their horse and carts full of people. Nobody believed that Allende had really won.

"And then the official news was given that he'd gained the largest number of votes and it was absolutely extraordinary.

"All those people who'd been struggling all their lives were crying and Allende arrived and he was almost in tears and I remember I had the honour of going to congratulate him. And he said: 'Hug me harder because this is a very special day.'

"I was too English in a way. I was shy. And he said, 'Give me a good hug.' Then he went out on the balcony of this crumpled building that was maybe three feet long by one and a half feet. And he went out and greeted all the people who were massing in the street. And they were the people of Chile. The real people of Chile."

The Chilean stock market responded with a fierce bout of panic selling. There were food shortages, hoarding of goods, and other gloomy indicators from the private sector. For Victor, however, the Allende government meant headlining tours of Latin America, of Europe and enormous concerts in Santiago itself. In Chile's shanty towns and factories, he organised song festivals. He created a record called The Shanty for the people of Herminda de la Victoria, where a baby had been shot dead by police during an uprising. The peasants of Rankil in the south of Chile asked him to write about their massacre of the 1930's. It was while he was working on this that Jara himself was cut down.

Allende had no easier a time of it. After the election the financial screws were tightened instantly about his neck. The World Bank (led by an American director) cut off all loans. The Inter-American Development Bank – which between 1959 and 1970 had loaned Chile some $300m – begrudged a mere $12m during Allende's three-year presidency. All of it went to a pair of rightwing universities.

Meanwhile the CIA ploughed some $8m "meddling money" into the country (a figure confirmed by Colby before the US Congress). Henry Kissinger had already made the State Department's position fairly plain when on 27 June, 1970, he told a meeting of the 40 Committee: "I don't see why we need stand by and watch a country go Communist just because of the irresponsibility of its people."

To compound matters, Allende was bogged down in economic troubles of his own making, many of them devolving from his "constitutional" stance – a position that forced him to seek the co-operation of shopkeepers, minor industrialists and officers of the military, most of whom were violently opposed to his Marxist doctrine and from whose ranks would spring the 1973 coup.
Joan: "We had little time to talk. We had our holidays together, but Victor was always coming or going. Going on tour or whatever … singing. And I had my own very concentrated work. It was like a celebration when Victor could be home on Sunday.

"I was happy in the sense that we were all doing what we felt had to be done, what was necessary to be done. I mean I didn't sit down and cry about that. I was working in the dance school at the time and let's say that what I did in Chile, in a schematic way, illustrates the changes that had taken place. I went out there to dance to elite audiences the municipal theatre and to do Latin American tours with the Chilean Ballet. Dancing always to the same thousand people in Santiago.

"And then from 1970 to 1973 I was dedicating myself to teaching teachers who were in demand even in the shanty towns. To teach the children of factory workers. To get out all over Chile and teach dance as a means of education."

The Jara workload accelerated rapidly over the months leading up to the coup. Allende's government, by now, was under serious strain and everywhere there were signs of a coordinated plot to topple the Popular Unity rule. The campaign which had begun in earnest after the September nationalisation of the copper mines (no compensation was forthcoming), peaked for the first time in October the following year with an armed strike by bus and lorry-owners.

There was mild subsidence around the March 1973 elections (Allende increased his majority to 44%), but by mid-March the plotting had resumed and had grown to include the generals, admirals and a cross-section of businessmen.

On 25 June a tank regiment attacked Allende's Palace – one of three false starts between 18 May and 18 August. On 23 August General Prats, a key Allende government appointment, resigned at the bidding of the three service heads. Prats was replaced by General Pinochet as overall chief of the military.

Joan: "10 September was the last normal day when everyone was in a state of great tension. Waiting, let's say, for instructions as to what to do. President Allende's government had been voted illegal and now we knew it had to happen before Independence Day, which is 18 September. That's the day when the armed forces are supposed to come out and march in front the President of Childe as a sign of loyalty and to celebrate independence from Spain.

"I spent 10 September – it seems ridiculous – giving dance classes. That's not because we weren't aware but because it's what had to be done. On the 11th I took the two girls to school, Chilean schools begin very early. At eight o'clock. And when I came back and realized what was going on.

"That there were military troop actions, that Allende had already gone down to the Moneda [the presidential palace] and he was installed and people were called to take their places at their work and we realised, let's say, it had begun.

"I hurried off back to school to collect the girls. When I arrived home Victor was preparing to go out. His place of work, technically, was the university and just that day there was an exhibition opening about Fascism and the horrors of civil war – and Allende was supposed to have gone there to open it and Victor was supposed to have sung. So he rang the university and set off because it was his duty to go there.

"And when he arrived he phoned me and said: 'Hello, I've arrived OK.' He said that the centre of the city was shut off. 'Stay at home. Stay with the girls. I'll try to phone you later.' The radio at that time – where Allende had been speaking – had already been bombed. Allende had already made his last speech. The Popular Unity radios had been bombed.

"Now the only thing you heard were military marches on all radios. Nothing else. Military marches all day long. Then us, waiting at home – we heard a tremendous roar and explosion. That was a dive-bomber sending off its bombs in the direction of a shantytown towards the mountains.

"And another dive-bomber and another on the same target and then they changed targets and they started throwing their bombs down on Allende's house which was near ours … say four or five blocks away.

"Mandy and her friends were playing outside and I called them into the house and told them to make a house under the table. But Manuela and I, we watched what was happening and we saw the helicopters coming down and the machine-gunning over the tops of trees.

"They quietened down a bit in our district. I tried to get through to Victor on the telephone. The telephones weren't cut off. After a while I got through to the university and asked for him. After some time he came to the phone.
"We talked. I told him what was happening and he said: 'Keep calm. Keep in the house. I'm to stay here.' And, well, nothing else. Then about half past four he phoned me again and we exchanged news. We told him it was quiet around Allende's house and we asked him if he knew what was happening around the Moneda and he told me now that it had been destroyed and it had been on fire, that he wouldn't be able to get home because of troop movements that were going on.

"He had to stay in the university that night but he said he'd try to get home when the curfew was lifted in the morning. And, well, his last words were how much he loved me, ya, and I said I did too and we hung up.

Reading on mobile? Listen to Victor Jara's Greatest Hits here

"And that's the last time we spoke."

There's profuse evidence to indicate that Pinochet's men possess appetites at least as macabre as any dictatorship hitherto recorded. A UN Human Rights report described the abuse of women as "having no comparison for brutality", while Amnesty International records that "torture appears to have become official policy of the Chilean government". Prison camps and torture centres were soon set up across the country with the bulk of the "investigative" powers resting with the dreaded DINA intelligence service who daily traversed the countryside in unmarked Chevrolets and civil garb, carrying guns.

A report by the Chile Committee for Human Rights carries several first-hand accounts of DINA's actions and those of the armed forces and of local police; one of these is from a mother who tells how both her sons and one of her daughters-in-law "disappeared" one day – and how later, one of the sons, looking ill and thin, was brought back by the military to fetch his nine-month-old baby.

It was only through the direct intervention of the Cardinal of Santiago that the baby managed to avoid arrest. One peasant woman whose husband was in prison reports being raped 18 times in six days. On the last occasion she was given electric shocks and branded on her leg with a hammer and sickle.

Another account described the insertion of a rat's head into a woman's vagina. Rumours abound, says the report, that Walter Rauf, the ex-Nazi at whose hands thousands of Jews were slaughtered, had, and may still have, an influential post with the Department of Investigations.

Education is entirely in the hands of the military that, amidst bouts of public book-burning, has expunged all "dangerous subjects" (the social sciences and philosophy), replacing them with instructions on "morality" and "national security".

A letter from the head of a school in La Reina to parents and guardians reads: "By order of Military Institutes, Brigadier General Nilo Floody Buxter, the rector of the college of Santa Rita, invites all the parents and guardians to a meeting which will take place on Tuesday, 3 September, at 8 o'clock sharp in the College Hall, Av. Larrain no. 7437. Failure to attend will be more than sufficient reason to proceed with your immediate arrest."

Electoral registers have been pulped, the Chilean TUC banned, collective bargaining made illegal. Economically, indications are grimmer than even the worst Marxist fantasies.

Inflation in June was running at 360% and expected to top 600% by year's end. (These figures, from the World Bank, are regarded as modest. Other estimates run to 1,000 and even 1,300% by year's end.) Unemployment is, naturally, rampant; 20% of the workforce, according to the same World Bank study.

As invidious as any aspect of Pinochet's junta is the daily "disappearance" of literally thousands of people. Many vanish at night during curfew hours. Often they are "delinquents" or "Marxists" and if there is any official explanation forthcoming it is usually proscribed that the individual was a victim of "Leftist in-fighting".

Victor Jara had been missing two days when Joan was telephoned by a man who said he'd just been released from the boxing stadium where Victor was still being held.

Reading on mobile? Watch here

Victor, the man said, didn't think he'd be able to get out – but that Joan should "take care of the children. Have courage and his love." On the Sunday she sought help at the British Embassy. Through the bolted gates she explained her predicament and it was agreed that the naval attaché would ask the Chilean military what had happened to her husband.

The following day the question was put. There was no explanation. Then, on Tuesday morning – Chile's Day Of Independence – a young man came to her door, showed his identity card and asked that he be trusted.

He worked at the morgue, he said, and among the bodies brought in, Victor's had been recognised. It was important that Joan come quickly to make her claim since the body would soon be buried anonymously in a communal grave.

"We entered through a side door. Outside there were crowds of people waiting. They had lists on the door that said Body X, Mass Killing, with a number – this long list and occasionally a name. Then we entered an enormous room in the morgue which, I suppose, was a sort of hall, not the place where bodies are normally kept. And it was absolutely full of hundreds of bodies of people who had died violently. People of all ages. Mostly working people. Some very young. Some with their arms tied behind their backs still. And with terrible wounds.

"And I had to go through all these bodies trying to find Victor's body. And it wasn't there. Then I had to go up afterwards to the second floor of the morgue – which was the offices, the administration. And here also in a long passage there were lines of bodies. And one of these … I found Victor's body.

"I can tell you the state of Victor's body because he'd obviously been tortured. I mean his body was full of bullet wounds and he had a sort of tremendous hole in his right hip.

"His body was distorted and his hands were hanging from his wrists and I have this vision of Victor's hands that somehow they didn't belong to his body.

"At the same time he'd been beaten over the head and his head was all bloodied and full of bruises. But I don't know if it's any value to say that among all the bodies that I saw, all of whom had died violent deaths, Victor's had, even in death, an expression of rage, of defiance.

"I had to go home again and fetch my marriage certificate and bring it back and they made out a death certificate and Victor was buried by me and this young boy. The morgue is almost next door to the cemetery and Victor was accompanied by me and a stranger – not a stranger; what we would call a companero – and then I went home and saw my children.

"In those hours I was waiting in the morgue I was witness to the people outside, the families outside looking at these lists. I was witness to one after the other of these terrible military trucks with red crosses on them entering into the morgue, down to the basement of the morgue, to empty the bodies. And as we were coming out there's this long passageway out of the morgue. And we had Victor's body in the trunk and we met one of those coming in and I just stood there. And he had to back out."

On the advice of journalists and British Embassy officials, Joan decided to leave Chile and take up the fight as an exile – lectures and talks throughout Europe, the US, Australia. In Britain she found a Tory government actively hostile to Chile's disenfranchised population. The new regime was quickly recognised and a policy of "no refugees, no asylum" enforced.

Almost alone among European nations, Britain refused shelter in Santiago to all but UK nationals.

British investment in Chile was, after all, still considerable. There was the matter of a £124m arms debt still outstanding and a private sector stake of some £15m – the principals here being British Leyland, Coats Partners, Unilever and Antofagasta Railway. It was British Leyland who, as a token of friendship, offered to donate four MG 1300's to Pinochet's regime and, when questioned on their indecent haste, explained that they were acting to "protect Britain's substantial interests in Chile."

The subsequent Labour government has shown more spleen in the face of the generals. While the regime has not been "derecognised", refugees are now being allowed into the country (1,000 have already entered) and there are demands that the Chilean arms debt be met at once and not rescheduled.
There has been activity too on the Clyde, where workers have managed to tie up a number of Chilean-bound submarines for at least another 15 months. And in East Kilbride similar tactics are being applied to stall several Hawker Hunter jet engines sent over for repairs.

Details of this and other monkey-wrenching were joyously delivered and received recently at a packed Labour rally in London's Westminster Hall. It was a night ending in tears, with Mme Allende pledging herself to the fight and with the singing of the Unidad Popular anthem.

Other British demos, marking the second anniversary of Allende's fall, were more modest. Three vigils staged outside the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Street were small, profoundly self-conscious events, arousing little more than amused stares from Embassy workers.

In America, government officials find themselves doubly self-conscious, being both victims and beneficiaries of events in Chile. "Even for the United States," says Joan, "it's an embarrassment to appear to be supporting the junta too publicly. Diplomatically they're in a very difficult position.

"But in America the artists have been more publicly in solidarity. The singers, especially. There was a concert organized there last May and there was Bob Dylan and there was a Beach Boy and there was [Harry] Chapin and Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Phil Ochs had told Bob Dylan a lot about the situation. Phil Ochs had been down to Chile and he'd met Victor.. And Dylan, he was very difficult to talk to, but we talked a little bit and he asked me a lot of questions about what was going on in Chile. And he said: 'Don't you ever relax? You've been in New York a week and you haven't seen nothing. Why don't you come down and see some nice pictures. Would you like to come and see some nice pictures?'

"And I said 'OK, ya, of course'.

"'Well, meet me,' he said, 'at the comer of 54th with the corner of Fifth Avenue' – or whatever it was – 'tomorrow at three o' clock and I'll take you to see some nice pictures.' And I never imagined he'd be there. And there he was leaning up against a lamp post. And he took me to the Museum of Modern Art and showed me around and said he was with us, ya. That's how he was, anyway, May 1974. I don't know how deeply it touched him really … I don't know."

Joan says she bears witness, only to those events she's personally seen. But her husband's death was a public one, enacted before 6,000 of his countrymen in the Santiago boxing stadium. Many of the 6,000 are either dead or imprisoned. Yet an account of Victor's death survives through Chilean journalist Miguel Cabezas, who described the events for America's University Review.

Cabenzas tells how the prisoners were housed in the bleachers of the stadium with the military down below. Volleys of machine gun fire periodically emptied into the crowd and bodies rolled down the inclines. Prisoners who hadn't eaten or drunk in days vomited on the dead bodies of their comrades.

Victor wandered around trying to calm them and rouse their spirits. He went down to the arena and approached one of the doors where new prisoners entered. Here he ran into the prison camp commander who "made tiny gestures of someone playing a guitar". Victor nodded his head candidly and the commander called four soldiers to hold Victor and ordered a table be put in the centre of the arena so everyone could see what was to follow.

"They took Victor to the table and ordered him to put his hands on it. In the hands of the officer rose, swiftly, an axe. With a single stroke he severed the fingers on Victor's left hand, and with another stoke, the fingers of the right.

"A collective outcry from 6,000 prisoners was heard. These 12,000 eyes then watched the same officer throw himself over the fallen body of singer and actor Victor Jara and begin to hit him while shouting: 'Now sing, you motherfucker, now sing.'

"Jara received more blows but raised himself and walked to where the arena and bleachers met. There was a deep silence. And then his voice was heard crying: 'All right comrades, let's do the senor commandante the favour.' He steadied himself for a moment and then lifting his bleeding hands began to sing with an unsteady voice the anthem of Unidad Popular. And everybody sang with him."

A volley was fired and Jara fell dead.

Then another was aimed into the bleachers at those who'd accompanied him in song and bodies tumbled down the inclines.

But Pinochet's men are already beginning to receive a cuffing from a gradually evolving resistance movement. News seeps through of "hundreds of new committees being organised", of guerrilla confrontations with army troops, of minor and major sabotage in factories, and of protests at schools.
Eighty priests harangue a bishop for his inclination towards the Pinochet doctrine, specialist workers withhold their labour, and public transport buses are "liberated".

Inti-Illimani and Quilapayun, who've been rousing audiences through Europe since the coup, arrive soon for a September 30 concert at the Albert Hall.
And Victor, well, this is his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium shortly before his death:

We are 5,000, here in this little corner of the city.
How many are we in all the cities of the world?
All of us, our eyes fixed on death.
How terrifying is the face of Fascism
For them, blood is a medal,
carnage is a heroic gesture.

Song, I cannot sing you well
When I must sing out of fear.
When I am dying of fright.
When I find myself in these endless moments.
Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song.

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