Classic Poem

It was because I was thinking, “Your elephants, tired of ease in their sheds
where they were lashed to strong posts that are hard through and through,
have bathed and have drunk there and so the watering places are turbid.
Like the followers of Murugan, who slew Cur and wears a garland
of green katampu leaves that carry the fragrance of the monsoon,
your warriors, with their curved bows and fine, sharp arrows,
have taken whatever they wanted and what they have not taken,
so that no others may take it, they have destroyed—the grain no one
now will cook Groves of trees guarded in honor of kings
have fallen in every town, chopped down by sharp axes. Everywhere
wild fire is roaring so that fine, well-built houses
in great cities are consumed by the blazing flames! Each day he goes
there, and he shames his enemies as they see all this, and he does
far more, he whose insight surpasses that of any other man!”
Because of this, to see you, who showed the strength of Death
as you slaughtered and conquered in the battle of Alankanam where
your army assembled was so enormous the earth was twisted out of shape,
I have traveled through a wild wasteland where there are no people,
and a young doe racing, leaping, clinging to her young fawn, in that
fearful and barren place where the red silk-cotton trees loom over her,
feeds on the pale flowers of the velai because
her handsome stag who had lost his horns has been caught by a tiger!