1. The confusion appeared, so the heart has no comprehension,
Nor on the departing neighbors is there any reliance.

2. As for them, they are enemies - we do not speak to them,
While it is the friend in whom is pleasure and playfulness.

3. It was as though when the two guides drove me with it
Towards Al-Eewanah during the plague stumbling,

4. The day I departed with my saddlebag without my armor,
While my heart was busy with parting fully occupied.

5. Then I was girded on my she-camel to send it
After the caravans passing through the valley, and it was comprehended.

6. So a swift tear flowed copiously, moistened by
Water, and it tilted within its eyelid playfully.

7. So I said, “Why have the caravans of the living hidden from my vision?
Have the wolves devoured them or have they been carried off by ghuls?”

8. They hide for a while so I cry, then the kinfolk of the forenoon raise them up,
And the communications of nightfall lead them with the caravans.

9. They walk with them while the vertigo of mid-day heat distorts them,
Their shadows to their hands inclining.

10. And for their vestiges on the ashes is the clamor of crawling,
And for the mirage upon the gravel plains is delusion.

11. Until when the afternoon prevented them from passage
And the heat kindled, they uttered a saying: encamp!

12. And they faced a valley in which the ringing of pigeons,
As though it were the moaning of Anbati camels lamenting.

13. Of my liver, nothing remains for me to live by
Because of the length of travel and the separation of encampments.

14. With every kind of affliction stinging them
From needs of the living: tokens and pensiveness.

15. From those who wander while their loincloths, when they turn away,
Flutter, and their anklets jingle not with bells.

16. He adorns the enemies of her neck and breast
A man effeminate, perfumed, and dressed in beautiful clothes.

17. She passes by him, though he be treacherous,
As though they were bunches of lote trees bending over.

18. Swaying of the well-rounded camel litter wherein she rides
Propped up, her belly girth and intestines exposed.

19. As though between her neck and breast
Were embers therein of the stars of night embedded.

20. Her saliva heals consumption and mange -
A sickness for whoever she has made ill: unfailing remedies.

21. Her saliva heals the ringing in the ears wherever the sleeper turns to her,
After the wine cups: a draft from it and a kiss.

22. They hasten to her even if they are in a hurry
At Shi’b from Mecca - the graybeards, the weak.

23. She captures hearts, so among her visitors are those
Who exceed the limits and are destroyed.

24. As though her laughter one day when she smiles
Is lightning whose clouds are dense, rumbling,

25. As though it is a flower the vintners have brought
A choice bouquet of pleasant fragrance plucked.

26. As though she is, when slumber reveals her bangs,
A poured ingot that the scales have not diminished.

27. Or a buried hoard that the youths have uncovered,
Until her saliva was exposed and her collar.

28. Or an ewe that the soft sands had isolated
From her accustomed pasture - cheeks clearly tattooed.

29. In a lofty abode of the musical entertainer living,
With the jinn of twittering, and the evil eye, the observers.

30. Her soul said to her, “Be with him at his birth
For the wretched, if you go beyond, are eaten.”

31. So the heart is concerned with terrors that alarm it,
And the flesh, from intense fright, is withered.

32. It grows accustomed through a heart not divided
And a pearl that no misfortunes have disgraced.

33. Until one ferocious of nature restrained her in the air,
Deafening, while I reddened the cheeks, disgraced.

34. He clenched his jaws on her - all who approached him
Turned away, and into his trunk was insertion.

35. Of the flowers that the breeze had scattered
Nothing remained on his nose ropes except amulets.

36. As though between his eyes and forehead
Were from his dye in the blood of the people a handkerchief.

37. Sturdy as a spear, clenched in his hands,
And from it the canals stretched out, and in them a ghoul.

38. He crosses the deserts in leaps, and his watering place
From lack of grief is pools - water wheels.

39. When he first snorted, and made her hear it,
With a lofty mansion or bend below,

40. The ululation almost burst from his larynx
And rattling between his jaws: broken bits.

41. She shook the black rocks with decorated hooves,
And their striking when they struck: soft sounds.

42. Until she came to the camp of the wretched one, searching for him,
And around her were pieces of him scattered.

43. The searching of a mourner for a heart in her playgrounds,
And henna on her hands embedded.