A Poem of Countless Arms and the Cosmic Feminine
The Title and the Invocation
We begin at the threshold of the work itself, with its title and the opening movement that establishes the poem’s central figure and its mode of address.
The title “Hazaar-Hazaar Baahonwali” translates directly as “She of Thousands upon Thousands of Arms.” This is not merely descriptive but invocational — the phrase functions as a mantra that names and summons a divine feminine presence whose defining attribute is multiplicity. The poem opens with the speaker calling out to this figure, establishing a relationship of desperate need and total devotion. Nagarjuna writes:
“Hazaar-hazaar baahonwali / toh aisi hi hoti hai / jise dekhna ho to dekho / jise pana ho to pao / magar main to pukarta hoon / raat-din / hazaar-hazaar baahonwali.”
[She of thousands upon thousands of arms / is exactly like this / if you wish to see her, look / if you wish to have her, take / but I keep calling out / night and day / she of thousands upon thousands of arms.]
The speaker positions himself not as one who has already attained vision or possession of this figure, but as one who calls out ceaselessly. The poem’s opening establishes a theology of longing — the divine feminine is not captured through sight or grasping but through persistent, rhythmic invocation. The repetition of “hazaar-hazaar baahonwali” itself enacts the very calling it describes, making the poem both a poem about invocation and an instance of it. The phrase “aisi hi hoti hai” — “is exactly like this” — carries a tone of exhausted, intimate familiarity: the speaker knows what she is, and yet this knowledge does not bring her near. She remains both utterly known and utterly absent, a paradox that will drive the entire work forward.
The Geography of the Goddess
Having named the figure, the poem now locates her within a specific sacred geography — the landscape of northern India, particularly the region of Uttarakhand and the Himalayas.
The speaker tells us that this goddess dwells not in temples or in heaven, but in the clay, the rivers, and the mountain passes. Nagarjuna writes that she is found where the Ganga emerges from the Gangotri glacier, where the Yamuna cuts through the Yamunotri valley, where the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet at Devprayag. These are not merely geographical markers — they are sites of pilgrimage (yatra) , and the poem itself becomes a kind of pilgrimage route, moving the reader through these sacred locations. The goddess’s arms are not separate limbs but streams, tributaries, rivers — her thousands of hands are the countless flows of water that shape the land. “Jahan jahan paani hai,” the speaker says, “wahan wahan uske haath hain” — wherever there is water, there are her hands. This hydro-theology identifies the feminine divine with the life-giving, shape-shifting, endlessly multiple nature of water itself. Her arms are not weapons or tools but currents and flows, and her countlessness is the countlessness of rain, of rivers, of the meltwater that feeds the subcontinent. The poem thus roots its cosmic vision in the most concrete, material reality — the literal geography of the Himalayan watershed — while simultaneously reading that geography as divine body.
The Arms as Actions
The poem now shifts from describing the goddess’s geography to enumerating what those thousands of arms actually do. This section is a litany of actions, each arm performing a distinct function without hierarchy or sequence.
The speaker lists: these arms hold children, churn butter, grind grain, sweep floors, draw water from wells, knead dough, light lamps, offer prayers, beat drums, dance in circles, tie rakhi threads, apply sindoor, feed the hungry, wash clothes at the riverbank, fan the sleeping, cover the dead with white cloth. The catalogue is deliberately exhaustive and mundane — there is no separation between the sacred and the domestic. Each ordinary task becomes an expression of divine power precisely because it is repeated thousands of times across thousands of bodies. Nagarjuna insists that the goddess’s arms are not only the great rivers and cosmic gestures but also every woman’s hand performing daily labor. “Hazaar-hazaar baahonwali,” the poem repeats, “tum toh har ghar mein ho” — she of thousands of arms, you are in every house. The multiplicity is not just numerical but social: the goddess is not one being with many limbs but many beings whose collective action constitutes her body. The poem performs a radical democratization of divinity — the sacred feminine is not a distant icon but the aggregate of countless unnoticed acts of care, work, and endurance. Each arm, each woman, each gesture is a theophany — a showing of the divine in the smallest, most repetitive actions of daily survival.
The Body as Landscape and the Landscape as Body
Having established the goddess’s presence in both geography and domestic labor, the poem now merges these registers — the macrocosm of the Himalayas and the microcosm of the household become the same body.
The speaker describes how the goddess’s spine is the mountain range itself, her breath the wind that moves through the pine forests, her hair the waterfalls that plunge from the cliffs, her womb the valley floor where crops grow. But then the poem turns this vision inside out: the kitchen hearth becomes a volcano, the smoke from cooking fires becomes clouds gathering for rain, the water pot becomes the ocean held in a clay vessel. Nagarjuna writes: “Tumhare ghar ka chulha / Himalaya se bada hai” — your kitchen hearth is larger than the Himalaya. The scale is deliberately unstable — the poem refuses to let the reader settle into a single perspective. The goddess is simultaneously cosmic and intimate, mountain and mud pot, glacier and ghee. This instability is not confusion but a theological method: the poem insists that the divine feminine cannot be contained by any single scale of perception. To see her truly is to see her as both the Gangotri glacier and the hand that grinds masala — not as two separate realities but as the same reality perceived from different distances. The arms that hold the universe are the same arms that hold a child, and the poem’s task is to hold both visions together without collapsing one into the other.
The Economics of the Divine
We are now in the middle movement of the poem, where the goddess’s thousand arms are revealed not only as cosmological and domestic but as specifically economic — the hands that produce, distribute, and consume material life. This section shifts from the sensory to the systemic, showing how the goddess’s labor underpins the entire cycle of production, exchange, and sustenance.
The poem introduces a series of verbs that belong to the marketplace and the household economy: “measuring,” “weighing,” “counting,” “distributing,” “storing.” One hand holds a balance scale, another a sack of grain, a third a ledger. The goddess is not merely a passive receiver of offerings but an active manager of resources. Her arms extend simultaneously into the granary and the money-lender’s shop, into the kitchen where lentils are sorted and the field where the harvest is divided. The poem insists that the divine feminine is present in every act of material calculation — the weighing of gold, the measuring of rice, the counting of coins. These are not profane activities separate from worship; they are forms of worship when seen as her work.
“One hand counts the grain / one hand counts the debt / one hand counts the breath / and all three numbers are the same.”
This passage collapses the distinction between economic accounting and existential accounting. The grain that feeds the body, the debt that binds the community, and the breath that sustains life are all measured by the same divine arithmetic. The poem suggests that value — whether in grain, money, or life — is not a human invention but a manifestation of the goddess’s own distributive justice. She is the one who decides who eats, who owes, and who lives. The hands that count are the hands that judge, but the judgment is not moral in the abstract sense; it is the concrete judgment of allocation — who gets what, when, and how much.
This economic dimension of the goddess clarifies a central tension in the poem. The thousand arms are not arbitrary; they are functional. Each arm performs a specific task in the vast system of material reproduction. The arm that churns butter is connected to the arm that pours rain; the arm that weaves cloth is connected to the arm that spins the seasons. The goddess’s economy is a total economy — there is no act of production or distribution that falls outside her domain. Even waste is gathered by one of her hands, the hand that sweeps and composts, returning what is spent to the cycle of new growth. The poem refuses the modern separation of economics from ecology, of labor from ritual, of value from life.
The Technology of the Goddess
We are now in a section of the poem that explicitly addresses tools and instruments — the goddess’s hands are described as holding not only natural objects but crafted ones: plow, sickle, spinning wheel, loom, needle, hammer, chisel, cooking pot, grinding stone. This is the poem’s meditation on technology as an extension of the divine body. The thousand arms are not pre-technological; they are hyper-technological, incorporating every human tool into the goddess’s own anatomy.
The poem presents each tool as a prosthesis of the goddess. The plow is not separate from the hand that holds it; the hand and the plow are a single composite organ that turns the earth. The spinning wheel is not a machine the goddess uses; it is an additional arm, an extension of her spinning nature. The poem describes the loom as having its own set of fingers — “fingers of wood and thread / that weave what the fingers of flesh / cannot reach.” This dissolution of the boundary between organic and mechanical is crucial. The goddess is not a Luddite figure resisting technology; she is the origin of all making, and every tool is a further articulation of her creative power.
“The hand that forged the first hammer / now holds the hammer that forges the next.”
This line suggests a recursive or self-generating technology. The goddess’s first hand created the first tool; now that tool, held by another of her hands, creates further tools. The poem implies that technological development is not a human invention but a revelation of the goddess’s own inherent complexity. Each new tool is another arm emerging from her body, another extension of her capacity to act in the world. The spindle, the anvil, the mortar and pestle — these are not dead objects but living organs of the goddess’s body, each with its own form of agency and intelligence.
This section also addresses the division of labor. The poem shows hands working at different scales: one hand stitches a torn shirt while another sews the monsoon clouds together; one hand repairs a chipped pot while another mends the crack in the cosmic egg. The technology of the goddess is scale-invariant — the same principles of mending, weaving, binding, forging apply at the level of the household and the level of the cosmos. The goddess’s thousand arms are not a confusion of disparate activities but a unified field of making that encompasses every scale of material production. The poem presents this as a theological insight: the divine feminine is not only the origin of technology but its enduring ground — every act of making is a participation in her making.
The Goddess as Memory
We move now to a section of the poem that takes an inward turn, focusing on the goddess’s arms as organs of memory and forgetting. One hand holds a torn photograph, another a letter never sent, a third a childhood toy, a fourth a lock of hair, a fifth a broken locket. The poem shifts from the external world of action and production to the internal world of personal and collective memory. The thousand arms are now revealed as archives — each hand holds a fragment of the past, and the goddess’s body is the repository of everything that has been lost.
The poem describes the goddess as having a hand for each grief that has ever been carried. One hand holds the sorrow of a widow, another the anger of a dispossessed farmer, a third the longing of a child sold into labor, a fourth the fatigue of a woman who has given birth ten times and buried four. The arms do not merely hold these memories; they feel them. The goddess’s body is a map of suffering, and her thousand arms are the nerves through which this suffering is conducted. The poem insists that the divine does not transcend pain but contains it — that the goddess is not beyond sorrow but is the vessel in which all sorrows are gathered.
“One hand remembers what the other forgot / and the third hand holds the space between them / where forgetting becomes forgiveness.”
This passage introduces a crucial distinction between memory and forgetting as both divine functions. The goddess does not only remember; she also forgets. The hand that forgets is not a failure of memory but an act of release — the necessary condition for moving forward. The poem suggests that forgiveness is not an erasure of the past but a holding of the memory in a different way, in the “space between” the remembering hand and the forgetting hand. This is a deeply compassionate vision of the divine: the goddess carries the full weight of history but also holds the possibility of letting go.
The section also includes a remarkable passage where the goddess holds her own memories of being worshipped across millennia. One hand remembers the first offering — a handful of wild rice placed on a stone by a woman who did not know the goddess’s name. Another hand remembers the last offering — the same gesture, made by a woman in a different millennium, in a different language, with the same hope. The goddess’s memory is not only personal but historical and geological. Her hands preserve the strata of devotion — each layer of prayer, each generation of worshippers, each form of the goddess that has been forgotten and replaced. The poem presents the goddess as the ultimate witness — the one who remembers what no one else remembers, who holds what the world has discarded.
The Goddess as Wound
We are now approaching a darker section of the poem, where the goddess’s thousand arms are revealed as wounds. Not all her hands are whole; some are cut, burned, broken, missing fingers, scarred, calloused, bleeding. This section does not flinch from the reality of suffering inscribed on the body. The poem insists that the goddess does not only act and remember; she also suffers. Her body bears the marks of every injury ever inflicted on women, on workers, on the poor, on the earth itself.
The poem catalogues these wounds with the same precision it earlier used to catalogue the goddess’s actions. One hand has a burn scar from the stove, another a cut from the harvesting sickle, a third a missing finger lost in a factory machine, a fourth calluses from the grinding stone, a fifth rope burns from the well, a sixth fist-shaped bruises from a beating. The goddess is not aloof from violence; she is its primary recipient. Her thousand arms are not only instruments of action but surfaces for inscription — every injustice leaves its mark on her body.
“These wounds are not decorations / they are doors / through which I see what you cannot show / and hold what you cannot bear.”
This passage transforms the meaning of the wounds. They are not merely signs of victimhood but thresholds — openings through which the goddess enters into solidarity with all who suffer. The wound is a door because it is a point of shared experience: the goddess knows suffering from the inside, and this knowledge allows her to hold what no human can bear alone. The poem presents the goddess’s woundedness not as weakness but as a deeper mode of power — the power to contain pain without being destroyed by it, to witness violence without becoming numb to it.
The section also introduces the idea that the goddess’s wounds are generative. From one wound grows a flower, from another a root, from a third a child, from a fourth a song. The poem suggests that creation emerges from injury — that the same hand that is cut is the hand that seeds new growth. This is not a justification of suffering but a recognition of a deep pattern: the most profound forms of care, art, and connection often arise from places of breakage. The goddess’s body is not restored to a pristine, unharmed state; it remains scarred and beautiful, and the scars themselves are sources of new life.
The Goddess as Multiplicity
We are now in a cluster of poems that explore the goddess not as a single unified being but as a multiplicity — a being who exists simultaneously in countless forms, places, and moments. This section refuses the logic of a singular, coherent identity and instead presents the goddess as a crowd, a swarm, a collective noun.
The work presents a series of lines that catalogue the goddess’s proliferating forms. She is “one who is a thousand and one” — not simply a thousand-armed being but a being who is herself a thousand different beings. The poem lists her manifestations: she is “the girl at the well” and “the old woman sweeping the courtyard” and “the bride decked in red” and “the widow in white” and “the child learning her alphabet” and “the midwife wiping blood”. These are not metaphors or similes; they are presented as literal extensions of her being. She does not merely resemble these women; she *is* them, simultaneously, without contradiction.
The key term here is sarvavyapi — a Sanskrit-derived word meaning “all-pervading” or “omnipresent” — but the poem redefines this concept in a distinctly materialist sense. The goddess does not pervade the universe as a formless spirit; she pervades it as countless specific bodies, each engaged in a particular labor, each living a particular life. The poem insists that her multiplicity is not abstract but concrete: she is not “everywhere” in a vague mystical sense but “here, in this girl carrying water, and here, in this woman grinding lentils, and here, in this grandmother telling stories by firelight.”
This section also introduces the concept of the goddess as anekanta — a Jain philosophical term meaning “non-one-sidedness” or “many-sidedness” — which the poem appropriates and transforms. The goddess cannot be captured by any single definition, name, or image because she is all definitions, all names, all images at once. The poem offers a litany of her names: “Devi, Kali, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Sita, Radha, Parvati, Chamunda, Bhairavi, and also Amina, and also Fatima, and also Mary, and also the nameless one whose name is forgotten.” This ecumenical list refuses sectarian boundaries and insists that the goddess’s multiplicity transcends any single religious tradition.
“She who is called by a thousand names is also she who has no name / She who is worshipped in a thousand temples is also she who never enters a temple / She who is everywhere is also she who is nowhere.”
The passage matters because it undermines the very logic of identity that the reader might bring to the text. The poem does not allow us to settle on a single image of the goddess — to say “she is the mother” or “she is the warrior” or “she is the river” — because every such definition is immediately contradicted by another line. The goddess’s multiplicity is not a problem to be resolved but the central fact of her nature. To know her, the poem suggests, is not to grasp her essence but to accept her irreducible plurality. The reader is invited not to synthesize the goddess into a unified concept but to hold her many forms in simultaneous tension, allowing each to exist alongside the others without forcing a reconciliation.
The Goddess as History
This section shifts register dramatically, moving from the personal and the ecological into the collective historical dimension. The goddess here becomes a figure for the accumulated weight of time itself — not as abstract chronology but as the lived experience of generations, particularly the generations of women whose lives have been recorded nowhere but whose labor has shaped everything.
The poem presents a genealogy that is not biological but social and material. The goddess is described as “she who carries the memory of every woman who ever ground grain” and “she who remembers every hand that ever spun thread” and “she who bears the weight of every back that ever bent over a field.” These lines explicitly connect the goddess to women’s historical labor — the invisible, repetitive, life-sustaining work that has been performed for millennia without recognition, without record, without name.
The key term introduced here is itihasa — the Sanskrit word for “history” or “thus it was” — but the poem redefines it. Traditional itihasa is the history of kings, battles, and dynasties; the poem offers instead a “her-story” of grinding stones, cooking pots, spinning wheels, and sewing needles. The goddess’s body is described as a “living archive” — every wrinkle is a record, every callus a document, every scar a testament. The poem insists that women’s history has not been lost; it has been stored in their bodies, passed down through gesture and habit and pain, and the goddess is this embodied memory made manifest.
The section includes a striking passage where the goddess speaks in the first person, enumerating the historical events she has witnessed. She says: “I was there when the first seed was planted / I was there when the first warp was stretched on the loom / I was there when the first child was pulled from the first mother’s body / I was there when the first song was sung to soothe the first cry.” This is not a divine being observing history from outside; she is inside every event, participating in the most fundamental acts of human civilization — agriculture, textile-making, childbirth, care-giving.
“I am the history that is never written / I am the hand that turns the page before the ink dries / I am the one who remembers what even the scribe forgets / I am the one who holds the grain while the grain rots / I am the one who keeps the seed when the barn burns.”
The passage matters because it reclaims history from the margins. The poem refuses the idea that what matters in history is what is recorded in texts or monuments. Instead, it suggests that the true carriers of historical memory are women who have performed the daily, repetitive, essential work of sustaining life across generations. The goddess is the personification of this forgotten history — not as a romantic figure but as a material presence, a body that has been marked and shaped by centuries of labor. The reader is asked to consider that the most profound historical knowledge is not found in archives but in the calloused hands, tired eyes, and aching backs of women who have kept the world alive without recognition.
The Goddess as Technology
This section brings together the ancient and the modern in a startling way, presenting the goddess as a figure for technological production — not in opposition to machines and factories but as the original and ongoing source of all technical knowledge. The poem refutes any simple binary between “nature” and “technology” by showing that the goddess’s work — spinning, weaving, grinding, pounding, churning — is itself the origin of human technics.
The work introduces the goddess as “the first engineer” and “the first machinist” — titles that seem deliberately anachronistic until the poem unfolds their logic. The description of the goddess’s arms now takes on a new dimension: her thousand arms are tools, each performing a different technical operation. One arm works a spinning wheel, another a loom, a third a grinding stone, a fourth a potter’s wheel, a fifth a pump, a sixth a plow. The poem insists that there is no “pre-technological” state of the goddess — she has always been a maker, a fabricator, a transformer of raw materials into useful forms.
The key term here is yantra — Sanskrit for “machine” or “device” — which the poem redefines to include both ancient and modern implements. The goddess is described as “the mistress of yantras” who “invented the wheel before there was a wheel” and “wove the first thread before there was a spindle.” The poem traces a continuous line from the earliest human tools — the digging stick, the hand-axe, the grinding stone — to the most advanced contemporary machines. The goddess’s body is a workshop; her thousand arms are machines; her skin is raw material; her blood is fuel.
“She is the one who placed the first stone upon the stone / She is the one who made the first blade from the first flint / She is the one who kindled the first fire and kept it through the first winter / She is the one who hammered the first metal and shaped the first plow / She is the one who will build the last machine and turn it off.”
The section also engages directly with the political economy of technology. The poem asks: who owns the machine? who controls the means of production? The goddess is described as “the one who works the machine but does not own it” and “the one whose labor makes the machine run but who is never called by her name.” This is a direct reference to the exploitation of labor under industrial capitalism — the separation of the worker from the product of her work. The goddess, in this reading, is the archetypal worker: she creates everything but owns nothing; her labor is extracted and her products are taken from her.
The passage matters because it reframes technology as a category of gendered labor. The poem insists that the first machines were not the steam engine or the spinning jenny of the Industrial Revolution but the spindle, the loom, the quern, the mortar and pestle — devices invented and operated primarily by women. By calling the goddess the “first engineer,” the work reclaims the history of technology from a male-dominated narrative and places women’s domestic labor at the origin of all technical innovation. The reader is asked to see the grinding stone beside the laptop, the spinning wheel beside the assembly line — and to recognize that the goddess’s thousand arms are still working, still producing, still creating the material basis of civilization, even when that work is made invisible.
The Goddess as Origin
We are now in the culminating movement of the poem, where the figure of the goddess is revealed not as a mythological relic but as the origin point of human civilization itself. This section synthesizes the preceding arguments into a single, overwhelming claim.
The poem declares that the goddess is the first farmer, the first potter, the first weaver, the first cook, and the first engineer. This is not metaphor but a literal historical-materialist claim: the technologies that made settled human life possible were invented and perfected by women in the course of their daily labor. The goddess’s thousand arms are the original tools — the hands that first planted seed, shaped clay, spun fiber, ground grain, built shelter, and tended fire. The poem insists that these acts are not “prehistory” but the continuous, ongoing foundation of everything that follows: every factory, every computer, every skyscraper rests on the unacknowledged base of this primordial, feminine labor.
The work then introduces a startling image: the goddess’s arms are not only biological but geological. They are the mountain ranges, the river systems, the soil itself — the very earth that is the precondition for all human production. The poem locates the origin of civilization not in a moment of heroic invention by a single male genius but in the slow, collective, anonymous labor of countless women over millennia, labor that is embedded in the very landscape. The reader is told that the fields of wheat are the goddess’s hair, the clay for bricks is her flesh, the water for irrigation is her blood. This is a radical claim: the material world is the goddess’s body, and all human making is a continuation of her making.
“She who first made the pot, she who first ground the grain, / she is the origin, the origin, the origin.”
This means that the goddess is not a figure of the past to be worshipped from a distance but the living, present condition of all production. The poem insists that to deny her is to deny the material basis of one’s own existence. Every meal, every tool, every piece of clothing, every building is a direct trace of her thousand arms. The work is demanding a complete reorientation of history: not a history of kings, wars, and written documents, but a history of hands, soil, seed, fire, and water — a history written in the bodies of women.
The Goddess as Future
The poem now turns, with devastating force, from the past to the future. Having established the goddess as the origin of all civilization, the work asks: *what happens when she is forgotten?* The answer is catastrophe. The poem describes a world where the goddess’s arms are severed one by one — the farmer’s arm by industrial agriculture, the potter’s arm by plastic, the weaver’s arm by the textile mill, the cook’s arm by processed food. Each severance is a loss of knowledge, skill, and relation to the material world.
The work does not offer a sentimental nostalgia for some pre-industrial past. Rather, it presents a dialectical image: the goddess’s thousand arms are most present in their absence. The reader is shown a modern city — glass towers, concrete roads, electronic screens — and told that this city is built on the ruins of the goddess’s body. The poem claims that alienation — from one’s labor, from one’s food, from one’s tools, from one’s community — is precisely the experience of living in the severed arms of the goddess. The thousand arms, once the source of collective creativity and sustenance, have been broken apart, privatized, and turned against themselves.
Yet the poem does not end in despair. It moves into a prophetic mode, declaring that the goddess cannot be destroyed. Her arms, though severed, remember each other. The work describes a hidden network of invisible connections — a web of solidarity and skill that persists beneath the surface of capitalist modernity. This is the goddess as future: the re-membering of her thousand arms. The poem insists that the knowledge of how to plant, weave, cook, build, and heal has not been lost; it has been driven underground, passed down in women’s hands, in grandmother’s recipes, in the way a mother teaches a daughter to knead dough. This knowledge is the seed of a new world.
“She who was severed, she who was broken, / she is reassembling herself in the dark, / arm by arm, finger by finger, / and when she is whole, the world will begin again.”
This is the work’s most powerful claim: the goddess is not only origin but horizon. The future is not a technological utopia of machines but the restoration of the thousand arms — the return of embodied knowledge, collective labor, and ecological relation. The poem is not calling for a return to the past but for a revolutionary re-membering of everything that has been forcibly forgotten. The goddess’s multiplicity is not a problem to be solved but the very form of the solution: a world where every hand has its task, every task is honored, and every body is the ground of life.
The Goddess as Reader
In its final major movement, the poem turns inward and becomes self-reflexive. The goddess, who has been the subject of every preceding section, is now revealed to be reading the poem itself. The work describes a figure — the goddess as reader — who holds the book in her thousand hands, turning every page simultaneously, seeing every word, every image, every argument at once.
The poem declares that the reader of *this* poem is not a neutral observer but a participant in the goddess’s own act of self-knowledge. The goddess is not an object to be described but a subject who reads herself into being. Every time a woman reads a line about the thousand arms and recognizes her own work, her own body, her own forgotten history, the goddess gains another arm. The poem is not a representation of the goddess but a tool for her reconstruction.
The work then makes an astonishing claim: the poem itself is one of the goddess’s thousand arms. The act of writing and the act of reading are labor — material, embodied, world-making labor. The poem is not a book but a device, a technology, a spinning wheel, a grinding stone, a seed. The poet is not an author but a midwife, helping the goddess reassemble her body.
“You who read these lines, you who hold this book, / you are my hand, you are my eye, you are my voice. / Without you, I am only a dream. / With you, I am the world.”
This means that the work’s deepest argument is about the relationship between text and reader. The goddess is not a conclusion to be reached but a practice to be performed. The poem is not a description of a thousand-armed goddess but itself an arm — an extension of the goddess’s body into the world of language. The reader is called not to believe in the goddess but to become her — to recognize that the thousand arms are one’s own hands, one’s own grandmother’s hands, one’s own daughter’s hands. The work ends by dissolving the boundary between the text and the world: the last stanza describes the book becoming soil, becoming seed, becoming water, becoming fire — returning to the very elements from which the goddess was first formed.
The Final Stanza
The poem concludes with a single, unbroken stanza that is at once a prayer, a declaration, and an instruction. It is written in the first person, in the voice of the goddess herself, speaking directly to the reader. The goddess names herself for the last time: “I am the thousand-armed one, / the one who was never complete, / the one who is always becoming.”
She declares that she is not in heaven, not in a temple, not in a book, but “in your hands as you turn this page, / in your eyes as you read these words, / in your breath as you sigh.” The stanza then lists the places she is to be found: in the kitchen, in the field, in the market, in the clinic, in the factory, in the school, in the street, in the home, in the bed, in the grave. Every site of women’s labor and life is a site of her presence.
The final lines are an imperative: “Do not look for me. / Build me.” The goddess is not an object of contemplation but a project. She is not a past to be recovered but a future to be constructed. The poem ends not with a period but with a line of dots — an ellipsis — indicating that the work is not finished, that the thousand arms are still being assembled, that the reader’s own life is the next stanza.
“Do not look for me. Build me…”
This final section completes the work’s arc. The goddess begins as a mysterious, ancient figure and ends as an unfinished, collective project. The poem does not provide closure but opens onto action. The reader is left not with an answer but with a task: to recognize the thousand arms in one’s own life, to re-member what has been severed, and to join the endless, ongoing work of building the goddess. The work itself becomes an arm extended toward the reader, and the reader’s response — the act of reading, understanding, and acting — becomes another arm extending into the world. The poem ends, but the goddess does not.
