1. Do you know a path like the persistence of doctrines?
For a wilderness without a resting place for the rider.

2. The abodes which, while we were at Mina,
Were about to befall us, had the riders not come to our aid.

3. She appeared to us as the sun beneath a cloud,
Her eyebrow emerged from it, and she winked with her eyebrow.

4. I only saw her three times at Mina,
And she was, by my life, a chaste maiden with braids.

5. And one like you, I have indeed found not to be effeminate,
Nor a neighbor, nor the wife of a companion.

6. I called on the Bani Auf to cease their bloodshed,
But when they refused, I overlooked it in the War of Hatib.

7. I was a man who did not instigate unjust war,
But when they refused, I ignited it on all sides.

8. I strove to ward off war until I saw it
Would not abate through warding off, only draw nearer.

9. Since there is no defense against the inevitability of death,
Welcome to it, as long as it continues to reside in encampments.

10. When I saw that war had stripped bare,
I donned, along with the burda, the garb of the warrior.

11. Doubled over, its excess covers the fingernails,
As if its shoulder pads are the eyes of the hyena.

12. There came a band of Quraysh and Malik
And Tha‘labah and the comrades of Ibn Ghalib -

13. Men who, when summoned to death, sway
Toward it like the swaying of pregnant camels.

14. When they are alarmed, they cry out to the night
Like the swelling crests of waves, piling up.

15. You see the blow of the lances plunge down as if
They were the forelegs of gazelles in the hands of youths at play.

16. We spent the night at Atam, surrounding Mushammis,
Torches whose gleaming blades were like stars.

17. If only you cast Hanzhala upon our blades,
He would roll off the one equal to its piercer.

18. When we flee, the ugliest aspect of our flight
Is baring the foreheads and exposing the shoulder blades.

19. Baring the foreheads and lances mixed in altercation
While feet do not stop at the striking of blows.

20. When our swords are short, their attachment is
Our lines stabbing our enemies, so we strike.

21. On the day of Al-Hudayqah I engaged them recklessly,
My hand with the sword was like a playful tearing lion.

22. And on the day of Bu‘ath our swords
submission to a lineage whose penetration splits the compact body of Ghassan.

23. They render white when we meet our foe
And they redden sheathed, the well-aimed deadly strokes.

24. The Bani ‘Awf obeyed a leader who forbade them
From peace, until it was the first duty.

25. I wish for ‘Awf that their women say,
Hurling rejection: “Would that we had not fought!”

26. We spent the morning repelling them, their gleaming white
Revealing the anklets of the fleeing women.

27. Our swords reached a caravan of negroes,
And the children of slave women were slain.

28. Among us is one who renounced wine for thirty nights
Until he joined you with the battalions.

29. I allowed it for them when they would not drink
Its dregs unless accompanied by the wine-server.

30. Were it not for the notion of nobility that you know
And abandoning what your valor claimed among the drinking vessels.

31. You did not deny us any place we wanted
As an inviolable place for you but the water-skins’ mouths.

32. Why, in the thick of war, did you not show more patience
For our onslaught, though battle is difficult to ride?

33. We took vengeance on you with the blades until you were
More abject than foxes among the milk pails.

34. And when we descended on the plowed fields, our leader said:
“Wine is prohibited for us unless we fight.”

35. So the proud men among us gave him leeway
Until it was permitted for the drinker.

36. Would that Suwayd had seen those whom you dragged
And those who fled when the spears prodded them like hyenas.

37. So we turned to our children and women,
And there was none we left behind in Bu‘ath in sorrow.

38. I forgot, from the day my tribe
Reproached me, the day of Bu‘ath the day of rivalry.