1. Do your tears shed for the pain of separation run red,
Or do longing and passion color them so?

2. Is it the valley dove who cries for you, or
The wild dove who has banished sorrow?

3. "My beloved's tears flowed, but did not flow
Far, for neither my she-camel nor my camel went on," she said.

4. Can the cheek's down think that, though soft,
It hides the intention, O my friends, discerningly?

5. Of what use is nearness to the abodes when
This estrangement has become manifestly unfamiliar to me?

6. Woe to the injustice of coolness that makes a heart of affection
Turbid and lacerates the tearful eyes!

7. It has banished sorrow from me, and now that I have hired it out,
Why has my patience today become hateful?

8. Would that my eyes were the eyes of the fever's thorns
That knew what the evildoers of passions did!

9. Glory to Him who revived us with them and destroyed us!
O lady of the cheek whose pendant

10. Never fluttered above it and went forth,
My tears flowed from the injustice of your coolness;

11. It made them flow and made them gush from your eyelids like a dagger.
So the doctor sees me healed by a drop

12. That you to any beseecher would stint;
And he sees for your hardness, O perfidious one, a stratagem

13. To bring down the moons from the highest celestial sphere,
And to taste from the battle of your sword a draft

14. Whose flavor, if Yusuf had tasted, he would not have turned his back.
Good - as the mention of Muhammad made it good -

15. Is my praise that rivaled its fragrance with ambergris.
By him the Abode of Faith was exalted;

16. The Mother of Villages was honored by the pilgrims of the villages.
And by his name, the demons of treachery were banished,

17. And by his sword, the tyrants of the earth almost perished.
For it the caravans traveled secure from

18. Any enemy, bearing in their howdahs a jewel.
And from it injustices receded, just as

19. The ibexes of Duwar receded from the lion of the thickets.
So the world of his glory was adorned with the signs

20. Of honor that the stars described as a spectacle.
No king generously bestows the like of them

21. Save for one whose kingdom vies with Caesar's.
May God preserve him for us and make him last

22. As long as the stars continue and light flows!