The rice-birds come to the countryside at harvest time

Shoo, shoo, billit
Awan no panaggagaik
Adda no panaggaapit

We stand here, on the crossroads of the paddy dikes
The rice-birds will come a-visiting the countryside again
To snip the future on their golden beaks
Look at them chew their air
Their whistles with the price tag of silver coins
Dropping into the pit of our hunger
And we say amen to their pedestal, to their pantheon
That will gird our loins, our sons
To the paper gods of the rice harvests
To the figureheads of our corrupt creation.

They will come to the countryside, again, kiss
The brown laughter, the brown dream
You are our masters, they say in headless supplication
You are the dusty gold
You are one steely gold
Our deity, venerable in his tanned skin, in his tatters
Honorable in his slimy, greasy hands
Turns he the hour to fence our floor and open our door
With the stroke that writes his shame,
And in sweetened note they repine:
Listen, our friends, our countrymen
We speak the prophecy of the brown!

Where are they
When you slashed the chest of hunger
When you sowed the beaten honor at dawn?
When you dam and damned the gasp of your country
Into rivulets of little lives?
Where were these
Many times you called the earth to stop
That you could alight from its crux
They hovered on the skies above the cities
Drinking in gulps the collapse of time
This is living they said as they scattered happiness
Here and there; baptized the temples
With their names inviolate; giggling
Branded the soil, the firmanent as theirs,
While you searched the parched-
Meaning of your fragile earth

Stand firmly:
Here, they come, in swarms
Like locusts towards their green salvation
Have you seen them snatch with swooping golden beaks
The still unripe bowing grain?