Celiyan whose spear wins victories, how you displayed
the great abundance of lives and the singleness of Death
at Talaiyalankanam where Tamils battled on this broad
mass of the earth surrounded by the roaring ocean!
where women of high birth said, weeping in their anguish,
“Like a flock of small birds startled up, then settling on a hill,
their arrows have flown and lodged in an agonizing elephant
brought down on the battlefield when they won the victory, swords high,
cutting off its mouth with the hollow trunk so that it rolled
across the earth like a plow! And our sons who were not old enough
to wear their hair groomed and oiled lie beside our husbands and now
is victory ours?” while Death, seeing them, felt shame
and felt pity on the terrifying battlefield where you defeated
the noble power of the seven chieftains! And I, as I
was thinking that it is like the enormous stone of a trap
set by a hunter who knows how to make such things work so as to catch
great tigers, didn't I, with fervor,
embrace your chest where the necklace of polished pearls shone!