Classic Poem

He who gave away horses with gaits of various rhythms
and elephants and whole territories and cities with unending revenue
ceaselessly to singers, Ay Antiran has gone to the world
of the gods accompanied by his women with their tiny bangles
and their high-sloping mounds of love, when Death who has
no mercy took them away. At the side of a burning ground
where sedge grows, where a wide-mouthed owl settled into the space
of the hollow of a tree hoots to the dead his message
that they must burn and be added to the ashes, his body
rested, and vanished as the glowing fire consumed it. The eyes
of poets have been dimmed. Nowhere do they see anyone
who can shelter them. Their families clamor but they
can do nothing for them and they go off
shrunken with hunger now, away to the countries of other kings!