Classic Poem

Blissful kings who have protected and ruled over the vast earth
encircled by the dark ocean so that not even a speck of land as large
as the center of an umbrella thorn leaf belonged to others
have gone away to their final home on the ground where corpses burn,
more of them than the sand heaped up by the waves. All of them
have gone there and have perished as others took their land.
And so you too should listen! There is no life that endures
with the body and does not vanish! Death is real and not
an illusion! Before the grim day comes when on the burning ground
where thorn bushes grow wound together with spurge
on that broad site where the biers rise up and a man of a caste
that is despised picks up the boiled,
unsalted rice and does not look
anywhere around him and gives it
to you so that you accept a sacrifice for which you have no desire
with its dish the earth itself, before that
happens, do what you have decided to do
and utterly renounce this world whose farthest boundary is the sea!