Classic Poem

I stood at the high gate of Elini who wears a curving ornament,
the king of the Atiyar, he whose white umbrella is like the moon!
It was dawn and under the pale moonlight the dew was settling in.
Like the foot of a war elephant was the dark, one-eyed kinai drum
I held in my hand, and I drummed out a rhythm upon it and I sang,
“You have beaten down the formidable walls of fearsome kings
who refused you tribute and on every one of your great
battlefields where demonic spirits roam and the ground is
soaked through with blood and fat, you have yoked
a vile herd of white-mouthed donkeys and planted horsegram
and common white millet and you plow new fields every day! May
your life be a long one!” As I had come to him and was standing
right there, at once, he stripped off my tattered garment
that looked like the roots of duckweed with its large leaves
growing in a pond from which a town will drink and he dressed me
in fine cloth of costly thread with a wonderfully elegant border
and told me to eat, pouring aged toddy as strong as the sting
of a scorpion into a dish as golden as the planets in the sky
and gave me foods, one after another, and more! a seat and a feast
for us to enjoy! That great man whose ancestor
brought us the sugarcane, as hard to gain as amrta, from the land beyond!