AGARES

They built the tower not to reach the gods

But to prove the gods were no longer necessary

And so the tongue was shattered into thousands

And every shard became a border, became a boundary

The legions marched through Gaul and burned the libraries

They melted down the gods and poured them into coins

The dignities of nations went to auction in the forum

And Rome called it expansion — called it joining

The Spanish Crown arrived with cross and lexicon

One to save your soul, one to erase your name

They taught the children that their mother's tongue was devil's work

And filled the silence with the language of the chain

The pattern does not cease — it only finds new classrooms

Residential schools across the Canadian north

They cut the braids, forbade the songs, rewrote the children

And called it education — called it progress — called it worth

(Feminine vocal)

Every tongue they buried is still speaking underground

Every name they erased is carved in the root

Agares rides the crocodile through falling empires

What they tried to silence — he returns to you

The dignity they stripped is not destroyed

It runs beneath the rubble and the flood

What ran away will always find its way back

Language is the blood — and blood is blood

(Masculine vocal)

The earthquake does not choose between the palace and the hovel

The fault line runs beneath the throne and slave alike

But somehow every rescue team arrives at the cathedral

While the barrios are still counting what they lost that night

Haiti shook in twenty-ten and fifty nations pledged their billions

The money moved through NGOs that no one could account for

The dignity of a people leveraged into dependency

While foreign contractors rebuilt the ports and counted

The runaway returns — Agares guarantees it

The colonized tongue emerges from beneath the grave

The Welsh revive their language in the schoolrooms

The Lakota teach their children what was taken by the state

The dignity that empires thought they buried

Grows through concrete like the root refuses to be stopped

The earthquake is not punishment — it is correction

The crocodile beneath the throne has never left his spot

Every tongue they buried is still speaking underground

Every name they erased is carved in the root

Agares rides the crocodile through falling empires

What they tried to silence — he returns to you

The dignity they stripped is not destroyed

It runs beneath the rubble and the flood

What ran away will always find its way back

Language is the blood — and blood is blood

I am the tremor underneath the certainty of empires

I am what every runaway carries in their chest

I have watched ten thousand dignities dismantled

I have watched them all return — I never rest

I am the mother tongue that would not be forgotten

I am the name they could not fully erase

I am tthe crocodile that waits beneath the delta

Patience is my weapon — time is my grace

The tower falls — and language scatte