1. O my charming home, I bid you greetings
I strolled in you, and in you flowed my verses

2. I left you, though leaving did grieve my heart
With waters of tears and fires that smart

3. A place you were, where I frolicked in my primes
A pasture, where grazed my steeds at their times

4. I ask the birds about you, hoping they’d tell
Or, from you, some news the birds would yell

5. In you, homesick is each far wanderer cured
Of hardship and journey however endured

6. Wherever he wanders, he finds, casting his cane
Kinsmen, and in-laws, and brethren again

7. Young men, like straight arrows whenever they stirred
With their souls you’d ransom every brave knight

8. Of beaming faces and gentle palms, they
Neigh shrill, and ride swift, and never betray

9. A guest in the morn ne’er leaves ere the eve
Unless like the home folk he’s made to believe

10. They believed in the god of love and vied
To exalt and revere his signs as they spied

11. A blind lad they fancied, his hands though may fling
Arrows to smite even the tyrant and king

12. Bare flesh, if touched by the stab of the cold
Save his sighs of passion, shelter can’t hold

13. A girl he’d surprise unaware of his tread
As she dreams, curtained in her veil and bed

14. Then her eyes after his visit seem shy
And her heart is the prey of fancies gone awry

15. To her mother she moans of the pain love has brought
And the mother divines, though the secret she caught not

16. A rider sways and tumbles, if playfully teased
By her hands with the sword, though valiant and pleased

17. You never find him except sadly awake
By relics and ruins his tears to partake

18. An old man, whose frame out of worship now shakes
His bones brittle, his flesh reverent fear takes

19. No glance his but snatches him swiftly away
From praying, from counting beads as they pray

20. Girls sally at night, bright as comets that run
’Twixt a moving planet and stiller one

21. From each dimpled cheek shines, in necklaces set,
A pearl, as if hid in an oyster wet

22. Towards cups that are bared, though the drinkers are shunned
As if made of the gold in pure sunlight spun

23. A land, as though the land’s god had willed to accord
The perfections of beauty, all stored

24. In its orchards, they threw out the cheeks of sweet maids
And named them all blossoms and fruits in its glades

25. Of each charm there, all jewels and necklaces they rid
And so they were pebbles dragged by brooks as they slid

26. Had I a speck of the clay of its build
No day would the world leave me damaged and spilled

27. Or, succeeding, the heaven I lastly could gain
My sins and misdeeds I’d wash off in its rain