Joan Baez: Havel
Praha, říjen 2006 (v době konference Forum 2.000). Snímek archiv
///
Havel
:::
A hotel in Bratislava
On a concert day.
The evening will be televised,
Live!
Vaclav Havel and his fellow dissidents will come tonight.
They are driving down from Prague.
The hotel phone rings at last and I jump
Only a little jump, but the chair falls over
Me, Hello?
A voice, Hyello. Hmmm. Dis is Havel. I am in Lobby. Hmmm. Very myenny police.
My room fills with dissidents
All wrapped in cigarette smoke
Havel looks like a kid
He is smiling a humorous, pleased smile.
Live Television?
We agree to make mischief.
Havel speaks syllables into my cassette recorder.
I write them out in phonetics on scratch paper.
The words say
I’d like to welcome to this evening’s concert
my good friend Vaclav Havel!
In Czech.
I with an earpiece in my ear
And my notes
I will slowly repeat the syllables into the microphone.
But first
More mischief? I ask
Yes, yes. More mischief!
We decide he will carry my guitar to the entrance of the hall
And we will tell the police he is my road manager.
He will hand it to someone else and we will all lock arms to get him to the relative safety of the balcony, in the middle of the crowd..
More?
– More mischyef. Hmmmmm. Dere is guy, hmmmm singer. Ivan Hoffman
He lives here in Bratislava hmmmm
Can not sing in public for several years
– Wonderful!
Tell him to bring his guitar,
You can feel it in the air
The unrest,
The undaunting feeling of
„change is gonna come“
The people will be unstoppable now.
They wade forward
Into the tide
As it sucks itself out to sea
Gathering strength
For the coming storm
While the spotlights beam and dance on the crowd
I say my little piece and gesture in a tall wide arc to the balcony.
… to my good friend Vaclav Havel!
And the crowd explodes.
The officials cut the sound off.
So I stand there facing upwards and sing
Over the crowd
Swing Low, Sweet Charriot
Without a microphone,
And the hall goes silent
As that song soars up and seeps into his soul
And stays there forever.
That’s what he’s told me anyway,
Over the years when I have gone back to visit and chat,
In the theatre where the new constitution was written
By poets and writers and mathematicians,
All wrapped in cigarette smoke
Or in the palace
In your office
Heavily decorated with grand gifts
From grand people of the world
And where the statue of the Golden Lady
Looks on when you perform your presidential duties
Signing things and answering the phone…
And you are both
all wrapped in cigarette smoke.
There is one room in the palace
Cloaked in gloom.
Exactly the way the Communists left it.
Dismal
Ugly
All wrapped in meanness.
After the storm,
After the victory,
After the lights of the fireworks dim,
No one has slept
When the dawn comes in
There is a shiver of disbelief as the sun comes up on a new world
The silent ones, like moles, come up from their pitch black warren
Squinting at the sun
You see there? They say, pointing, The risk takers!
You knew there would be no real change
Without the risks,
And you took them all.
I’m so glad you went on smoking
After the doctors told you to quit,
You loved it so!
The Dali Llama will agree
You’d had the ten thousand sorrows
It is time for the ten thousand joys
///
Joan Baez, December 22, 2011
Národní třída, 17. listopad 2009. Snímek archiv
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