In Mato Grosso, Brazil
Progress cuts straight lines
Through ancestral circles
Slash-and-burns green forest
Into plains of red dust
Rips through fragile ecosystems
That have faces and names

In Mato Grosso,
There is an epidemic
That is spreading:
Suicide by hanging
The youngest
Was Fortunata

Fortunata
Was only ten when her life fell
Like the trees around her
Fortunata
One child in eight
Living in a hut
Baby sister sitting on the red dust floor
Watched as she put the rope
Around her neck

Never a chance to live your name
Misfortune came instead to claim you
Far from the forest green your fathers knew
You now hang rootless
Fortunate one, your life had just begun

(No fish, no hunt, no trees, no forest green
No fish, no hunt, no trees, no forest green . . .)

Some say,
Her people lost their way
Without their land
Some say suicide is a protest
Hanging a way of stopping
The word or spirit from ascending through the throat

Fortunata
Her mother dead, her father gone
To drown his sorrows in the alcohol
He makes for strangers
Fortunata
She wasn't sad or so they said,
Perhaps she heard about the others
And then one day
Put the rope around her neck

Never a chance to live your name
Misfortune came instead to claim you
Far from the forest green your fathers knew
You now hang rootless
Fortunate one, your life had just begun

(No song, no prayer, no home, no hope for change
No song, no prayer, no home, no hope for change . . .)

How loud your silence speaks
How far and yet as near as the air we breathe
Fortunata
Was only ten when her life fell
Like the trees around her

A Guaraní spiritual leader says
We have to spend a whole day,
Two days, to pray and baptize the earth.

BLESS THE EARTH
Bring our fortune back to us
BLESS THE EARTH
Turn the red dust into forest green
BLESS THE EARTH
Help us not to kill by how we live
BLESS THE EARTH
Teach us not to kill by how we live