Classic Poem

Purananuru - Part 333

Poets! If you should go to where little rabbits with big ears
and black necks and eyeballs like buds—like the bubbles that rise
when a hard shower falls on water—are playing and leaping near a bush
in a pitted courtyard within the city, you should stay a good while,
even though the misery there is such that no one conceives of the worth
that accrues from feeding poets and so no one will tell them to eat.
Then take your leave. Because you are leaving, the woman of the house
will feel a desire to feed you and since she has willingly given away
all the common millet and the little millet as food
to those who have come in need, because she has nothing left
worth giving to you poets in return for your visit to the city,
she will set out on the surface of a mortar the millet
that they have left dry on the stalk as seed and she will never
let you go away empty. Assembled at every hunter's house in the city…
. . . . . . . . . . if kings
should come, with their elephants encircled by girths and ridden
by strong men, with lofty chariots, wearing their gloves made of the skin
from the backs of lizards, the food will be just the same
and the gifts that hero gives will be what he has seized from the enemy!EnglishPulavans