Classic Poem

I have seen no generous men and I try to think of how I can escape
from my troubles. I pack my things and carry the fiber and soft shoots
of palmyra with me and because I have nothing to eat, I search
the directions, trying to find a wealth of food for my large family
burned black under the sun and drooping as hunger devours them.
I have come, dried out from the sweat of fatigue, with my stomach
withered and shrunken! Behind me I leave a wilderness where the cry
of an owl harsh as a tuti drum resounds across the wasteland
and a vulture is heard calling out for his mate from his perch
on the lovely forked branches of an uluñcu tree within a vastness
full of drought where bamboo dies scorched and dries away
and the ridged fruit of the bowstring hemp shrivels. I have come
like a bat, its mind filled with the thought of a tree in fruit.
I have come here, to the field where the gurgling blood rises
and spreads across the earth, since a cloud of glowing weapons
has rained down the ripe, wished-for fruit and when the rich
curving grain is cut, the stems heap up and elephants circle
like buffaloes to thresh and reduce the many piles of fallen corpses,
driven along by the palmyra whip of the sword. Beating out
my clear rhythms on my large-eyed tatari drum, singing praises
of the broad field of violent valor, to show its glory, I have come
in search of a gift that will be like a mountain with high, lovely,
iron-tipped tusks. O greatness! you who are lord of the fearful field
where a female demon finds and snatches a powerful braceleted arm
severed by an ax and weeps from exhaustion because her legs are tangled
in the coils of the ridged guts
of fearless men, as the vulture and the red-eared eagle wheel in the sky!