Verse 19

¹³All these, Brahma and the rest, carry out your bidding, home of clarity; they are like us, Lord, and are not shaken. For safety, for the thriving of beings, and for his own delight, this is the Bhagavan's playing in his lovely descents. ¹⁴So let your anger go. The demon is killed, and even a good man is glad at the killing of a scorpion or a snake. The worlds have come to rest and go their way again. Man-lion, people remember this form of yours to be rid of fear. ¹⁵Unconquered one, I am not afraid of your terrible face, the tongue, the sun-like eyes, the knotted brows, the fierce tusks in their rush; nor of the garland of entrails, the mane wet with blood, the ears like stakes, the roar that frightens the elephants of the quarters, the nails that split your enemies.

¹⁶What I fear, you who are tender to the wretched, is the grinding of the terrible wheel of the round of birth, past bearing; I have been handed over among those who devour. Bound by my own works, loveliest one, when will you be pleased and call me to the root of your feet, the refuge that is release? ¹⁷Burning in every womb in the fire of grief born of parting from what I love and joining what I do not, and taking for the cure of that pain what is only pain again, I wander in wrong thinking, vast one. Tell me how to be your slave. ¹⁸So let me sing after them the stories of your play, the play of the dear one, the friend, the god beyond all, the stories Virinci sang, and cross the hard places easily, man-lion, loosed from the strands, with the swans who live at your two feet.

¹⁹A child's parents are no refuge for it here, man-lion; nor medicine for the sick, nor a boat for a man drowning at sea. Whatever cure for suffering comes easily here goes only so far, mighty one, for those you overlook.