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What I've Seen
- In my travels, I have gone
- where loyalty and reason,
- courage and wisdom, amount
- to nothing, and
- where a man gains
- by lavish praise alone –
- here, the talk must be sweet,
- even when a lord's sown salt.
- Whoever, like me, values
- honesty, and knows right
- from wrong – he'll turn away,
- but won't be spurned like others
- (I won't say who or how).
- Elsewhere I've known men
- who'd not lie, or lose honor.
- In this place I dreamed
- a single theme: I saw
- a hoopoe catch an egret,
- and I saw the hoopoe's crest –
- What does the egret mean?
- and how'd the hoopoe best it?
[English version by Adam Mahler]
