Poems Of India - IX

Not one, not two, not three or four,
but through eighty-four hundred thousand's vaginas*
have I come,

I have come
through unlikely worlds,
guzzled on
pleasure and on pain.

Whatever be
all previous lives,
show me mercy
this one day,

0 lord
white as jasmine.


* The belief that the soul will go through eighty four hundred thousand rebirths in many forms of living beings before being born again as a human.

-- Akka Mahādēvi [Translated by A. K. Ramanujan in the book - Speaking of Siva]

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