1. Send word to 'Afra that your friends have come up with a plan,
And ask her if she is expecting us today.

2. Woe to 'Afra whose house is so close,
I care not if people blame me or make excuses.

3. If estrangement from us has cast doubt on her,
Passion and fervor will not diminish in me.

4. When she turns her soft cheek, the highest part,
Its heaviness makes her shoulders almost dance.

5. Her mouth smells sweetly of gum that oozes
From a tree's split bark flavored like ripened fruit.

6. It's as if her mouth when you come visiting her at night
Were wine mixed with resin or freed from its amphora.

7. She is made smooth with rain water fallen from a pavement
Of untouched azure, no murkiness mixed in.

8. The pounded aromatic wood, camphor, is blended with it,
As is ginger and spikenard made potent by dawn.

9. She is a beauty, perfectly formed, neither too tall nor too short,
Her legs pressed together like the trunks of palm trees.

10. She is like the sun on its luckiest day,
Or a pearl examined for sale or the moon.

11. When she knew I would leave her, she said
"Would that I had died before this day, O my life!"