Classic Poem

Wearing a garland of wild jasmine full of seeds and a few blossoms
and buds as sharp tipped as a kuyil's beak resplendently
bedecking your thick black hair, you drank once, and again,
of liquor as amber as a tiger's eyes poured out in a new cup,
and then because a tuti drummer wearing a chaplet of dried leaves
and drumming the call to battle on his drum had come,
you refused to praise and accept the filtered, intoxicating
toddy they then offered you but instead took up this sword,
they say, into your powerful hand and with it after tracking
bowmen who had seized the many long lines of cattle in combat
where the warriors wore fragrant basil, you cut down
those enemies while the red vultures screeched, sailing on their curving wings!