Akka Mahadevi

I have fallen in love

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no death,
knows no decay and has no form;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who has no middle, has
no end, has no parts and has no features;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no birth and
knows no fear.

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who is without any family,
without any country and without any peer;
Chenna Mallikarjuna, the Beautiful, is my husband.
Fling into the fire the husbands who are subject
to death and decay.

Akka Mahadevi 

(from www.poemhunter.com)

Akka Mahadevi, a major Kannada poet, is highly revered for her talent as well as her beliefs. True to the bhakti or devotional tradition, she expresses her love for Krishna (Mallikarjuna) using the language of human bonding. The divine husband is beyond form and substance, but is Real, compared to the flesh and blood men who are terribly wanting. The provocative final lines make us question if human love can ever reach the kind of ultimate intimacy she has with the Beautiful One, her divine husband.

What I find interesting in this poem is her address to the mother of the Beautiful One. The mother is as powerful as her son--a universal belief in the feminine energy at the center of divinity itself--but the mother is the intercessor, the ultimate arbiter.