śrī umāṣṭakam

Eight verses to Uma which begin as an ordinary meditation and then turn into a story. The first three describe her for worship: a chowrie in the right hand and a lotus in the left, red-clothed, an image of compassion; golden, two-armed, holding a blue lotus in the left hand; bright as a hundred suns, giver of enjoyment and of release, to be worshipped seated on her lion. Then the fourth verse changes tense and reports something that happened — to a devotee named Shivarama, in a dream, she showed her own form, and the form she showed was one that gives dispassion. The verse after it goes further and says that the goddess afterwards took the form of a crow, out of a wish to favour her devotees, which is the kind of local particular that rarely survives into a Sanskrit ashtaka.