Classic Poem

You who travel seeking gifts! You whose words are full of wisdom!
Over and over you repeat, “Bard with your small yal, the strings as sweet
as honey! Rest here a while and enjoy, beaten on its clear eye,
the music from the big drum balanced upon its thin sticks
like a turtle drawn from a reservoir and impaled on an iron rod!”
If you bring to your mind the fine reputation of Killi Valavan,
lord of a prosperous country where the two healers of hunger,
rice and water, abound and the spacious residences know nothing
of the fire of war but are aware only of the kitchen fire so filled
with rice it does not matter how much may be taken out for use, since
the rice never grows any the less—as if it were water in a cool
reservoir in the moist month of Tai—and if you travel to him,
quietly and leisurely, with your dancing woman and her glowing face
and her lovely smile and her hair fragrant with trumpet flowers
from a village ruled by Pannan who gives with open hands
and where the six-legged bees searching around the many sweet smells
sip at the blossoms of small white waterlilies, then you will be rich!
Unlike gold earned by bringing firewood into a city
and depending on the chance of sale, his generosity is certain! May his efforts prosper!