In June last year I posted a link to a Jeremy Corbyn speech on the topic of building bridges, not walls.

Here are a couple of (more poetic) links on the same topic.

The first is from Anaïs Mitchell.  This song was written over 10 years ago, as part of the folk opera Hadestown, and the word are those of Hades, Lord of the Underworld:

An interesting interview with Anaïs Mitchell from 2016:

The singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell grew up on a sheep farm in semirural Vermont to a soundtrack of folk ballads and protest music. As a child, she believed that “if you could just write a song good enough, you could change the world.”

That belief has never quite left her. She is testing it in her first musical, the theatrically frisky and musically daring “Hadestown,” a version of the Orpheus myth retold in the American vernacular, which just opened at New York Theater Workshop.

…

One of Mr. Page’s songs will send a shiver for anyone following the presidential election: “Why We Build the Wall.” Though Ms. Mitchell wrote it a decade a ago, the song has taken on the uncanny echo of Donald J. Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail. Ms. Mitchell is unsurprised. “Political leaders will always invoke that image when it serves them,” she said, “because it appeals at a visceral level to people who feel scared.”

Ms. Mitchell is not scared, and she plans to keep writing — for the concert stage and the theatrical one. The Orpheus-like part of her insists on it. “Whether or not you can change the world with a song, you’ve still got to write the song,” she said. “You still have to try.”

Full interview at The New York TimesNew York Times.

The second is from Melanie Safka, singing “Close To it All” at a live performance in 1971: