1. Sheathe your sword, for your glance is unsheathed
How much blood has it spilled unjustly?

2. If it denies having killed me, its cheeks
Are upright witnesses against it

3. You have unsheathed it angrily against lovers. Has
The Quran sanctioned what you do?

4. Or is it an obligatory duty for the beautiful
A path I see it not inclined to?

5. How can the path to your misguidance be once
Off the track of your estrangement, while my guide is my yearning?

6. What will aid me regarding you except sorrow
While your eyelids in sleep are turbulent?

7. Be as you wish, for beauty is no governorship
So injustice is the companion of one deposed.

8. You may do wrong and not do good when
The flimsy girdle wanders round your waist.

9. However much you move coquettishly, narcissus stalks
Are tranquil upon their dewy pillows.

10. Your charms have not ceased to bend
And incline except when fully armed.

11. My enduring passion kindles against you
A flame - my dissent to it and its saying:

12. It did not know that blaming it in my hearing
Is nothing like your union, to which there is no path.

13. Leave it and its foolish love preaching. Has any
Ascetic like me been deterred from passion by a sermon?

14. Its rebuke and my turning away from its advice
Are what ease the sickness, though it drags on.

15. A flat-nosed one with a slender waist is my beloved,
The waist made slender by the girdle’s compression.

16. True were its sides that told us
Nothing is precious but the smallest pearls.

17. It picks fault with me and charges me with its own crime,
A glance that in its languor is threaded.

18. Let it slander and wrong as it wishes, for thus is
This world - some steep and some gentle.