1. Is it your saliva or the water of a cloud
Or is it wine that cools me yet burns my liver?

2. Are you a branch or a bundled rod or sheer temptation -
And whose cheek did I kiss that lightening struck my lips?

3. They saw the face of my beloved in the dark, those spies of mine,
And said, we see a sun though dawn has not come up.

4. The ones enchantment has for its glances
Swords sheathed forever in my blood, red eternally.

5. The stillness of her beauty in her movements comes to an end -
So to none revealing her face remains an excuse.

6. To you, son of Yahya, son of al-Walid, it came
To destroy me, did Jesus whose flesh is my poetry and blood my verse.

7. I sprinkled the heat of her mention over the warmth of her heart
And it flowed - though the earth seemed long to her eyes as a span

8. To a lion of war whose sword welds the lion
And a sea of dew in whose waves the sea is drowned

9. And if his munificence remains from his pedigree
Like what remains in the lover from estrangement

10. A youth each day whose soul encompasses the height of his wealth
The spears of glory, not the short-haired spears of ignobility

11. So far between him and the clouds is the distance
That their attainer is a sprinkle and his attainment a flood

12. Were the world to descend to the judgment of his palm
The world and most of it would become a trifle

13. I see him as small, so great is his worth
For what is the worth of the great to him but trifling?

14. Whenever he gestures with his face to the sky
The Pleiades shake for him and the moon is eclipsed

15. You see the earthly moon and the king whom belongs
The kingdom, after Allah, and glory and fame

16. Often wakeful though not from sickness in the eye
In what ennobles him thought sets him restless

17.
He has a peer that praise wearies, as though

18. She swore she would never repay gratitude to him
O Abu Ahmad, glory belongs only to its people

19. And no man touched by glory's forelock has glory
People are nothing but that from virtues

20. Civilization sings of them and travel chants of them