Classic Poem

In the fields on the red hills where the monsoon has brought
abundant moisture, though venkai trees had grown there before
in the intense heat, they plow many furrows and mix in the dust
and do their planting, and when the many stems spring up mingled
with palli weed, they root out those weeds so that the ears
flourish and grow big, and then when the dark stalks rise high,
the color of a peahen that has just given birth, and are dry
at top and base, they cut the fresh common millet that has grown
so very well and they cut the little millet, and then when the green
sesame seed blackens, it becomes time to reap the white pods
of the densely growing bean vines and in every household, in the huts
roofed with grass, they share the clarified toddy that had been buried
and matured in liquor jars, and frying katalai seeds in fragrant ghee,
they cook their rice. And the woman of the house with her long arms
serves out the food so that people can mix it up together and eat it
from large plates, in that land ruled by the man who resembles Murugan,
the man who longs for war, who has listened to the clatter
of the war anklets of his enemies running from him, the man used to being sung
without end by poets, the father of the girls with luxuriant black hair,
his land where waving bamboo rustles on the peaks,
is his land of such wealth that no one ever feels pain now destroyed?