ASIAN 226 Poetries of Asia Sanskrit court poetry from Vidyaakara's subhaashitaratnakosha. (translated by Daniel H.H. Ingalls) 622 The pet parrot chatters, "Give me to eat or I shall tell aloud all you have done in secret." at which the young wife's face, lowered in shame but with an inward smile, is charming as a half-blown lotus bent down beneath a bee. [Dimboka?] 1528 The vultures, beating back the flames with strokes of their flapping wings and each competing with fierce beaks against the rest, have dragged from the blazing pyre a corpse and gorged themselves on its freshly roasted, almost flaming flesh. See them with burning craws now heading for the river. [Paanini] 61 The column of black smoke attacks the women of the Triple City: hastening over their kerchiefs & tarrying on their braids, it creeps to the opening of their bodices and bursts in flame upon the ridges of their breasts. Victory to the god who looks, wet-eyed with pity, and lets the bow fall from his hand. [Mayura] 1405 The ladies of your enemy have nothing left for earrings but palm-leaf ornaments; for garlands they wear wildflowers & clothe their swelling loins with birchbark from the woods; their breasts they ornament with liquid mineral found on the Vindhya slope. And thus they spend their days playing with baby monkeys in their laps. (a turnabout) 1306 Somehow, my wife, you must keep us and the children alive until the summer months are over. The rains will come then, making gourds and pumpkins grow aplenty, and we shall fare like kings. [Dharaniidhara] 1321 You gave me feet to tire of travel, a wife to leave me, a voice for begging and a body for decrepitude. If you are never ashamed, O God, do you not at last grow weary of your gifts? [Raajashekhara?] 1307 The children starving, looking like so many corpses, the relative who spurns me, the water pot patched up with lac - these do not hurt so much as seeing the woman from next door, annoyed and smiling scornfully when every day my wife must beg a needle to mend her tattered dress. 1320 Often the pauper's children go to others' houses. With their little hands leaning against the doorways, hungry, but with voices hushed by shame, they cast half glances at those who eat within. 1175 When villages are left but all but a few families wasting under undeserved disaster from a cruel district lord but still clinging to ancestral lands, villages without grass, where walls are crumbling and the mongoose wanders through the lanes; they yet show their deepest sadness in a garden filled with the cooing of gray doves. 1461 Happy are they who in some mountain dale sit meditating on the highest light, the fearless birds alighting in their lap to taste the tears of bliss. But here I sit in a pavilion set in a pleasure garden by a pool within the palace of daydreams; and as I daydream, I grow old. [Satyabodha] 653 "My child." "My lord." "Leave off your anger, proud one." "What harm if I am angry?" "It makes me sad." "But you have done no wrong, the fault is wholly mine." "Why weep then as you speak?" "Who sees me weeping?" "Why, even I." "And what am I to you?" "The one I love." "I am not; and that is why I weep." [Kumaarabhatta] 697 The bond of his affection broken, the value that he placed on me in his heart erased, this man now walks before me like any other man, his love now ceased. The days pass with my thinking & thinking of these things. Dear friend, I know not why my heart breaks not into a hundred pieces. [from Amaru]