1. How to reach a phantom who's visited
While sleep estranges all the loved ones?

2. Love commands him and chastity deters him
Patience is foremost of what comes at the end.

3. I am the one whom, whether dawn shone or night fell, a spinning entranced,
For chastity and piety bolstered him.

4. The noblest of people in rank are lovers
The noblest love is that which hides its mysteries.

5. Why does my night not parade its stars?
And the phantom of dignity not accustomed to visiting?

6. Whoever's sleepless, has no patience to back him,
Nor fantasy to keep him company.

7. O wakeful one played with by the hands of parting,
Patience fails him and tears assist him.

8. The beloved who enraptured my heart with love
Sleeps from the length of a night you spend wakeful.

9. What familiarity on the day of separation where we stood!
While yearning stops me crying and commands it.

10. Her words and the tears of the eye suffice
This parting we used to fear.

11. Do you, companion of lovers, inform me
About the motley throng knotted at the encampment?

12. And have you seen before the tribe a girl
Like a singular jujube shadowed by the withered?

13. And you, rider whose mount quickens pace
To reconnoiter the tribe at night or early morning,

14. When you arrive, make my excuses and tell them:
Does the keeper of the promise remember the day of separation?

15. How wondrous is love! It spends the night obedient to a slave-girl
In the tribe, when its own script has failed him.

16. And it fears the tribe whoever comes or goes—
How to arrive when its guard sleeps?

17. O reproacher hoping for his relenting,
When love has dug its claws in him!

18. Do not ignite what knows not its own burning—
Are you his reproacher or his pardoner?

19. A rider who saddened the world with his departure—
Though tomorrow my heart will accompany him.

20. Will you inform him I cherish a love
Entrenched in my heart to keep his company,

21. That I am one whose inner thoughts and outward actions
Toward him are equally sound?

22. A brother's not one you trace blood ties to
But one whose conscience is clear to you.

23. I join whoever you join,
Depart whoever you leave.

24. I lack nothing you lose
Absent nothing you're present at.

25. Your missive folded in subtlety—
Perplexing who hears and sees it.

26. The eye roams what its writer traced,
The ear revels in its reciter's words.

27. If I stand before the tribe and recite it
Jewels would be bought though their mine's intact.

28. Abu Husain! Sincerest words are truest.
You're the friend whose dealings are wholesome.

29. If not for my boorish friends' excuses through you
They'd leave in shame, apologies rejected.

30. Where's the friend whose essence satisfies you
As his surface does amidst adversity?

31. As for the letter—no sooner do I read it
Than gifts rain atop gifts its bestower scatters,

32. Pearls run after pearls through it
Scattering pearls atop scattered pearls.

33. I'm one time never ruins his family
No fear spends the night as his neighbor.

34. Who makes every land he settles his homeland
And every people among whom he lodges his kin.

35. To no land does he stretch his tent ropes
But the waste and town quake for it.

36. Mine is the choice, keeping moderation,
Leaving the elite their share thereafter.

37. How can foes divvy up a man
Whose glory leads and triumph trails?

38. Of worthy stock, generous roots, one whose
Origins being virtuous makes his ends prosper.

39. His birth is Sa'eed bin Hamdan's
The rest, from Ali bin Abdullah.

40. The saying doer, the divinely protected prophet
The triumphant, supported Master, his star.

41. He built for us glory on high pillars founded
And erected might tightly welded.

42. So our virtues are none but his
Our glories none but his.

43. I lost my father as a child, so he was
To me, of men, like the lush fresh branch.

44. He is cousin when I trace lineage,
But patron I never disacknowledge.

45. He remains a refuge from what I dread,
Remains himself dreading what I dread.

46. When time appoints its timekeeper
It is through him the Muslim era prospers.

47. This is the letter of a melancholy heartstruck one
Whose composer and disseminator alike tire not,

48. And I began, the morn we parted,
With a promise of reply that you remember,

49. Staying until the turtledove's warble stilled
And the bright star's first glimmer waned,

50. Until the furthest you anticipate
And the gravest you fear are conveyed,