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from Vestur í bláinn by Julius Pollux

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lyrics

words taken from: Eduardo Galeano, Immigrants Today, Voices of Time, 2006.

Butterflies and swallows and flamingos have forever spread their wings to flee the cold, the way whales swim in search of other seas and salmon and trout seek out their rivers. Year after year, they
all travel thousands of miles on the open roads of air and water.
The roads of human flight, however, are not free.
In immense caravans they march, fugitives fleeing their unbearable lives.
They travel from south to north and from rising sun to setting sun.
Their place in the world has been stolen. They’ve been stripped of their work and their land.
Many flee wars, but many more ruinous wages and exhausted plots of land.
These pilgrims, shipwrecked by globalization, wander about, unearthing roads, seeking homes,
knocking on doors that swing open when money calls but slam shut in their faces. Some manage to sneak in. Others arrive as corpses that the sea delivers to the forbidden shore, or as nameless bodies buried in the world they hoped to reach.
In forty countries, over several years, Sebastiao Salgado photographed them. Three hundred portraits of this immense human tragedy amount to barely a second. The light that entered his camera for those pictures was barely a wink of the sun’s eye, no more than an instant in the memory of time.