śrī lakṣmī hayagrīva pañcaratnam

Five verses to Lakshmi Hayagriva — the horse-faced form of Vishnu with the goddess, the presiding deity of learning in the Srivaishnava tradition — and among the most ornate pieces of Sanskrit in this collection, worked so densely in internal rhyme that each line has to be untied before it can be read. My deity is the horse-faced one, says the first verse, whose self is knowledge and bliss and is spotless, whose very name is a hurricane to the great cotton-wool of the Kali age; and beside him she, gone to the middle of a white lotus, wearing a garland of pure lotuses, a mass of milk, smiling. The closing verse names the lineage it comes from, the line of Krishna Brahmatantra of the Parakala tradition, and calls her learning itself, quencher of the heat of those who are born.