Can you see that building, young man?
I helped them build it up
It was a time of afflictions
I had to take four buses
Two to get here and two to go back home
Now, after it's already finished
I look up and get dizzy
But then a suspicious citizen comes
And asks me if I'm there gazing at the building
Or if I’m there to rob people
My Sunday has been lost
I’ll go home saddened
It makes me want to drink
And to raise my boredom
I can’t even look at the building
That I helped to build
Can you see that school, young man?
I have also worked there
I almost got hurt there
I set the mortar
I helped people plaster its walls
My innocent daughter
Came to me, so happy
Telling me that she would register there
But then a citizen comes and tells me
'Poor children can't study here!'
Saying that she can't study there
This pain ached more
Why did I leave the North 1?
I began to ask myself
There the drought made us suffer,
But I could eat
What I planted
Can you see that church, young man?
Where the preacher says ‘amen’?
I build the bell and the clappers of it
My hand got full of calluses
I’ve worked there as well
There it was worth
There there are kermises2 and the novena3
And the preacher lets me get in
It was there where Christ told me
‘Man, stop being such a fool
Don’t let yourself be frightened
It was I who created the Earth
I filled the rivers with water, I made the mountains
I didn’t let anything lack
Now the man has created wings
And I can’t enter
Most of the houses
It was I who created the Earth
I filled the rivers with water, I made the mountains
I didn’t let anything lack
Now the man has created wings
And I can’t enter
Most of the houses
1. Referring to the Brazilian north2. Mass said on the anniversary of the foundation of a church3. An institutional act of religious pious devotion in the Roman Catholic Church