Before birdrise Before the songs of good omen The careful voice of the watchman Rouses the squad from sleep In the silence of lamplight We prepare our packs and check our guns Before the peasants rise We are ready for the enemy For any dawn raid to burst in on us We could follow stealthy stars behind night clouds And so we wait Our minds three steps ahead of possibilities The hamlet trusts us Our maneuvers are storied among the people   All's well With the cock's crow clear and confident All's well With the fire and the kettle full Of sweet potatoes and grandmother concern The old woman answers to ritual She thinks of rice and her fishtraps And of us before her waking Before the song of mortar and pestle I catch a gentle wind Before the rice husks billow like sails I open up at the edge of this mountain My eyes are the eyes of guerrilla forests I pulse with the intensity of a grenade   The land comes in Slowly from the nightblue sky The land comes in Slowly from the white areas unevenly citied Into the sunlight of these countrysides And falls gracefully from house to house From paddy fields to paddy fields Then changes into a hurrying river And my class consciousness climbs steeply From the rushing waters Flows with the ease of mountains And spreads as history in the becoming of gills My time is placed here A morning now with the peasant masses   Once I flew like the sky without direction Once I blew like the wind without assignment Now caught in this Gran Cordillera turning I learn much from the sky and the wind The land moves in on me in a new time Of upheaving proletarian spirit I can balance like a ravine in the moonlight And unearth me and the gifts of the masses The land fulfills urgent tasks in the people's war And wages armed struggle from start to finish Now the sky and the wind are in the land The call is to remold relations To release the forces of production And coming in is as the Party the Army the People   The early light burns brightly Summons up a wealth of vision I look back and wonder at where it began And what and why and how My urban centers are placed at midnight Heavy with the breath of liquor and sounds of words   A memory now without regrets With tales to tell to children and old men Foolishly I ask why the hills outrace the valleys And leave the vacillating to look for their shoes The dawn answers questions precisely tactfully Limns the backwardness of an irrigation system Checkers the selfish promise of ancient payaos And presents a peasant's house riddled with bullets   Over there that ridge last month We waited for the enemy to enter a killing zone In single file correctly distanced The mercenaries crossed our sights with the dikes A morning's moment held me so closely I tensed even if I knew what I was fighting for Surprisingly hang-ups disappeared like shadows Seized by the sun unerringly Home assumed the lostness of abandoned scaffoldings Behind the people's rifle the Red fighter Is reduced to principal contradictions The mind grasps the key links And nonessentials are abruptly forgotten The bourgeois world crumbles in the ambush position   I have come to this thus far But I have yet to clean the rice Organizing groups have to be formed and consolidated I am part of it all Mark this movement to bring the land in To beat with the time of the proletariat's persistence In the middle of life the recruit is not late Who accepts to be one with peasant worker and soldier Against the class enemies of the toiling masses See the land called barren carries the sunlight The land that shatters dreams Calls me to fetch water from the spring Yes Innoh Grandmother I know where the spring is I Comrade Jason of petty bourgeois origin