1. What ails these slender branches, sending
Their messages to hearts so tender, bending

2. To veil their charms from prying eyes, yet rendering
Such arts and spells past comprehending?

3. So shy, yet bold in ways beguiling,
Reviving, killing with their smiling;

4. Soft-voiced, but piercing glances, smiting,
Calm seeming, yet our souls exciting;

5. Bewitching us with magic potions
Our minds surrender, and our notions.

6. For swords they carry silken robes,
Exchanging glances sharp for globes.

7. With tresses trailing, lo, they venture.
Saw you a meteor flaming, scintillate?

8. Or sunrise rays athwart the spheres ascending
When they but slightly lift the curtains blending?

9. The moon, they claim, has copied their perfection.
What means the moon by such deception?

10. Who bears me to the vale where I was granted
The treasured pledge of beauty constant?

11. My loves, God forbid my eyes should wander,
Or my heart worship any but your grandeur!

12. That Qays, crazed by love of Layla tender,
Should slake his burning heart's surrender!

13. My friend, within my heart are traces
Sent by tears once safely hiding places.

14. They flow in floods since first he chanced to waken
Some careless eye, its glance not taking.

15. My tears decree the death of any gazer
Who dares let rest his glance, half-dazed, on her.

16. They race like quick pens writing as she dictates,
While she makes naked all our souls' states.

17. A sun whose rays at first misled us,
Then by misleading did proceed to lead us.

18. By her eyebrow's bow, her cheek's star brightly beaming,
Wrote the lines of beauty, all-redeeming.

19. She came veiled, carried like a cup I've sipped from,
A meadow fenced about with jasmine dripping.

20. The singing breeze discloses her, light drifting,
Bare branches in its robes her beauty sifting.

21. A wild gazelle, her glances hunters seeking prey,
Her lashes settle, nesting in her eyes' twin gray.

22. Cheeks of a rose, gazed on by the deer, entrancing,
A branch her waist, her brow a crescent glancing.

23. The wild deer robbed of her beauty, borrowed
Her eyes, and taught the deer new arts unsorrowed.