1. Ask the abodes how the arriver fared,
Or did their features show aught to the questioner?

2. I wandered asking them with the knocking of the heavy rain,
As if they were tablets of a drawn sword.

3. The donkeys recited their news amongst them
In donkey fashion in a withered scroll,

4. With vinegar the winds share their dust,
Blowing on them from Sabbah and changeful blowing.

5. To the winds and rains belongs what they already carried away
And what remains is the share of the destroyer.

6. Ruined abodes in the wilderness are pastured
By a tribe armed with weapons like the waist ropes of a caravan.

7. They meet the rush of dawn and dusk
Like the farewell, become in the shore-man's anchorage

8. What does it remember of the sojourn of a strange woman
Whose stay amongst the separating sands was long?

9. Of nights with a Ju‘fi maiden who picked
The fruit of hearts with languid fingers.

10. The Ju‘fi girl wondered at me, daughter of Malik,
That my cheeks grew young and the false one cut short.

11. Indeed did time spy out me and its turning
For following the slowly moving one at the cooking pots.

12. And for wooing a people I provided for his fire
A rain-pourer but it put it out with heavy downpour.

13. Indeed the wilderness presumed against Jasrah,
Disturbing its foetuses or partitioning it.

14. I find it as if the twilight of a straying old she-camel
Were between es-Sadees and the west of el-Bazil.

15. Release the she-camel when dawn rises high
Bearing a heavy burden and tottering with it.

16. So my riding beast is as if above the hump of a listing boat
From what is awakened by a moaner and then tossed about.

17. Biting the livers of the donkeys, a Shutaamah viper,
And their bellies the deed of the hissing cobra,

18. Clinging to the shoulders of the mean folk, hanging,
Its burden with the harvest of a molar-toothed asp,

19. Making the waters of the donkeys gush forth, a Mashrijah adder,
Water from the veins of the jetting one.

20. And when the water-carrier saw a shade cover
With a roof like the day of high-peaking ‘Urubah,

21. And the water-carrier at the top of Dahl cries out beneath it
A near approach making it complete with a fifth,

22. Fulfilling the Yafa‘ when its shade diminishes
So he lingers in it like the Rabbi arguing,

23. Until the glooms oppose them, and dark has hidden
Aside from the forms, the superfluities of dangling things,

24. The pack-camel gallops when its drinking plunges
Deep, and that is of the nature of the plunger.

25. It meets by Sa‘d some of its clear ones,
Rushing madly between overfalls and flash floods,

26. Picking its way down the Ikaam pass with lofty sides,
A smooth mountain road whose middle parts are like the head-ropes of a camel-litter.

27. Clamour like the call of ‘Abd Manafah
Is in its head above the morning of heavy downpour.