Czesław Niemen - Bema pamięci żałobny rapsod

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Hannibal

Shadow why are you leaving
Lying with your hands on your armor plate
Torches light up the coffin
Sparks play around your knees
Your sword green with laurel
Covered with candle drippings
Like mourner’s tears

Your falcon crying, and
Your horse kicking up his legs
Like a dancer

Streamers flowing
And chatting with each other in the wind
Streamers like
An army of tents flapping in the sky

Trumpets sobbing a song
That can break a heart of stone
Symbols of another day
Bow their heads and clap their wings
Dragons pierced by spears
Lizards and fabulous birds
Proclaiming honor to you
A legend in our own times

Mourning maidens bearing jasmine
Raise the sprays giving off perfume

Other maidens fill the vases
With their teardrops
Still others tear their hair
Searching for a way to show their sorrow
Though the road of grief was paved ages ago

Maidens smashing
Pottery do the ground in their grief
Others stumble on their way chanting
“Clay unto clay”
Young men swing axes at the sky
Angry at their loss
Serving men striking their shields
‘til streams of sparks fly out

Huge flags rising from the smoke
Higher and higher
Huge flags rising from the smoke
And soaring up to the sky

Slowly the mourners march ever downward
Sinking into the Earth
And than they march again into the moonlight
Illuminated by the call light of a star
Afraid to fall
Voices fill the night
And wash away like a wave

Onward, onward
Until we march right into the grave
Onward ‘til we see
The blackness beyond the grave
Onward ‘til we can no longer escape the depths
We will stop your horse
With the thrust of a spear

Screaming the procession
Brings sadness into the village
Striking screams against the gates
Like whistling axes
Making Jericho’s wall fall down like falling logs
Waking sleeping nations
Lifting darkness from their eyes
Onward, onward…