Classic Poem

The town is defended by forests that are difficult to cross
where a young hen frightened by her enemy—a wildcat
stalking within an old hedge there in the dark—trembles
for her life and clucks so loud it seems to tear the flesh
inside her throat; and then by the light of a small fire kindled
by a woman spinning cotton who rises to clean off the area
with its piles of seeds, the hen turns calm when she sees
her cock with his crest like the red flower of a coral tree.
The woman wants to apportion to guests and to bards who are with them
a stew cooked of a lizard with its short legs that was captured
only a short distance away on the shore of a pond by the children
of hunters and she makes the stew with yogurt, pouring on oily fat,
mixing in other good things. And a forehead ornament of gold that was worn
by a lordly elephant in a mighty battle where it charged
and won the fierce fight will be given away, a mighty gift, by her husband!