1. Why, O grave, have they labored, after burying chastity within you,
To urge from you ashes the high-eyed maidens would covet?

2. They shook your soil and patience alike
With a hand that clutches yearning hearts.

3. Just yesterday, burdened with passion, they departed.
With what have they returned today, so light?

4. Have they brought back what they took away
Of trinkets they left behind as keepsakes?

5. No! He who purified the water with it
Since it was his has added it.

6. And she whose soft cloak the live coal donned
Along with her, her immaculate shroud.

7. Rather, they returned the embers of passion to
Ribs that have dried upon them.

8. The grave concealed the daughter of revelation whose
Mention honored exalted minds.

9. Of the chaste, God struck for her
The tents of inviolability and curtain.

10. She bore only him who gives drink to all
The living: honey and limpid wine.

11. She whose stature never bent
Over any like her, to bewitch minds.

12. It cried, "Do you know when she was singled out
And the grave filled with clamor and cheers?

13. Is that the soil they presented to Fatima
Or did the holy world submit to her?"

14. Indeed in it is a legacy of a people
From whose ardors it seized a legacy.

15. Fate took her, but only after
It tore the mantle of guidance from her.

16. Upon her the passion of love once smiled
A tearless blind woman who knows no drought.

17. Bereft of the mother of a cub, it became a jungle—
Had the father of cubs passed through, he would have feared.

18. The Kaaba of rapture, except that it
Was created for the Most High to circumambulate.

19. The abode of sanctity in which God placed
The best of humankind's devotion and probity.

20. Say to those who aspired to stray from them:
"He who seeks to stray from truth goes astray."

21. Masters of rectitude, in their Mahdi
God made a requital for misguidance.

22. Each of them is a sea of knowledge that surged:
So draw from any of them you wish a draught.

23. In merit they surpassed mankind, drawing
Excellence and bygone morals in their wake.

24. Passion for them intoxicated even foes.
Thus she is the bright-faced one for gentleness and tasting.

25. Generous to the guest-lodges,
They slaughter the full moon, not the skinny camel.

26. They gave safety in God to those who gave them safety
And frightened those God frightened.

27. O wise ones, in you is tenderness
In which you muted change and diversion.

28. It was only the stroke of fate on your patience’s march
That multiplied its violence.

29. And over the advance of nights, never once
Did your towering verses complain of creeping.