1. Do not think your encampment or your ruins
Are the first places to miss you and grieve for you

2. Souls were fascinated by you before them
And passion for you grew in more than one infatuated heart

3. It lies empty, though it contains a family, and we find it desolate
Yet it contains a shelter, a resting place for camels

4. If that beloved were to travel from orbit
The sun would not be content with another to take its place

5. I love him, and love is madness and folly
And all love is foolishness and madness

6. The rain helps revive her when she is thirsty
While her clouds pour down and flood the land

7. Keep the war away from you, O my chief!
Both you who stay and you who travel on

8. If musk and ambergris were mixed with it
Its refuse would still smell better than perfumes

9. I am the son of one whose superior qualities
Surpass my father’s in the search, while his heir exceeds the excellence of his predecessor

10. One recalls ancestors because of their deeds-
Those who shunned and exhausted every stratagem

11. So my pride is a Arab who travels protected
And a Samharite who journeys well-guarded

12. And let pride then glory since I have ridden forth with it
Wearing the best of it and donning the finest

13. I am the one who God has shown thereby
Fates, and man is wherever God has placed him

14. A jewel giving joy to the noble thereby
And a choking grief no low person can stand

15. I almost consider the lies I engage in
Better than what the transmitter has conveyed

16. So no weak, rejecter, complainer, incapable or gullible one,
No feeble opponent whose sword betrayed him at the encounter and the skirmishes,

17. No listening weakling whose poetry
Baffles the careful critic unraveling subtle expressions,

18. And sometimes I attend a meal with
One who cannot equal the bread he eats

19. And he displays ignorance of me while I know him
While the pearl is still a pearl despite one who does not recognize it

20. I am shy before my tribes not to
Drag my train in other than their territory

21. I drag it in the presence of a king
Whose clothes are from his boon companion and his intimate

22. While the white tunics of his servants resemble
The first camel-loads of gifts from his treasury

23. Why should I not praise al-Husayn or
Expend the love that he expended?

24. Did the eye conceal from him any information
Or did the two tear-ducts attain what he hoped for?

25. Or is he not the striker of every obstinate head
Bared on the day of battle, made haggard?

26. The man of generosity – nothing separates him from it
Even if generosity itself could speak, he would rebuke it

27. The rider of horror – nothing makes him dismount
Even if horror itself had a girth, he would cinch it

28. The horseman in brilliant red Yemeni cloth
With a quiver slit open in the thick of the fighting

29. When his steeds saw his face
They swore by God they did not see his nape

30. So they exaggerated his feat, yet made it seem small
Though his feat was bigger than what he did

31. The perfecter and the joiner and the concealer
So that no part of his favor distracted him from another

32. The granter while spears made him a grove
The thruster while blades came one after another

33. And whenever he secured the countryside he would travel on
And whenever a halt was unsafe he would avoid it

34. And whenever the enemy resisted at dawn
He would find a way to make it seem he had tricked them

35. He scorns eggs and spleens when
The knowers of genealogy or camel spokes have authenticated his ancestry

36. Eloquence refined my poetry for him
While jurisprudence refined his reason for me

37. So I became like a quiescent sword - no one
Praises the sword except the one who wields it