Canción para un niño en la calle [version con Calle 13] [English translation]

Mercedes:

At this hour exactly

There's a child on the street...

There's a child on the street!

It's men's honour to protect what grows

to act so that there's no childhood scattered on the streets

to avoid that his ship heart sinks

his incredible adventure of bread and chocolate.

Putting a star in the place where his hunger is

doing it another way is useless, doing it another way is absurd

rehearsing joy and song on earth

because it's not worth a thing if there's a child on the street.

Calle 13:

Everything toxic from my country enters through my nose

I wash cars, I clean shoes,

I smell of work and also of cops

I steal wallets but I'm a good person, I am a smile without teeth

Rain without a roof, nail with dirt

I am what is left from war.

An empty stomach, I am a bruise on a knee cured by cold

I am the best tourist guide of the slum

for three pesos I show you the capital.

I don't need a visa to fly around the roundel

because I play with paper planes.

Rice with stones, mud with wine-

and I imagine what I lack.

Mercedes:

The world shouldn't go around with love barefoot

hoisting a newspaper like a wing in hand

climbing trains, trading laughter

hitting our chest with a tired wing.

Life just born shouldn't go around with a price

childhood risked for a tight gain

Because then hands are useless bundles

and the heart, nothing more than a bad word.

Calle 13:

When night falls, I sleep awake

one eye closed and the other open,

in case the tigers shoot me with bullets

my life is like a circus but without a clown

I go walking through the trench

juggling five oranges

begging everyone I can for money

on a bicyle with just one wheel

I am oxygen for this continent

I am what the president didn't take care of.

Don't be scared if I have bad breath

or if you see me without a shirt, with my nipples in the wind -

I am just one more element of the landscape

the street receipts are my camouflage

like something that exists, that seems to be fake

something without life, but that is still breathing.

Mercedes:

Woe is the one who forgot that there's a child on the street

that there are millions of children living on the street

and a multitude of children growing up on the street

I see them pressing on their little heart

Looking at all of us with a fable in their eyes

an incomplete lightning crosses their gaze

because noone protects that life that is growing

and love is lost

in a child on the street,

Calle 13:

Listen, at this hour exactly, there's a child on the street,

Mercedes;

There's a child on the street.

• Artist:Mercedes Sosa