1. With the cord of your covenant in passion I grow anxious,
O you, sacred to me for love's sake.

2. You surrendered me to torment in the abode of woe
When you bade me farewell and I resigned myself.

3. How often have I been refreshed by the water of your memory,
Then forgot what I knew of passion's pain!

4. O dwelling, why is your spokesman silent?
It is as if, concerning us, he does not speak.

5. Are our bodies, marked with its tracings.
As though clothed in a cloak of decrepitude,

6. And as if, with the tears from my eyes, dyed.
As though the down on your cheek, O home of passion,

7. Were my flowing tears, questioning and knowing.
By God, none but the healed know my love for him

8. For whose sake I am abased and blamed.
By my life, passion remains not in my flesh

9. Unless I say I am resigned to its dominion.
If he shut his eyes to me, destiny would not

10. Dream he was dreaming of me.
O you who have left, passion has played with your promises.

11. Patience where you are concerned I know too little of.
For me and passion, what lies between the wings of destiny -

12. Their night's sleep is forbidden me.
No night has been prolonged for me but for the passionate,

13. For you are gone, so all my days are dark.
Alas for my days whose shadows have ruled over us,

14. The turns of fate revolving and decreeing!
Days passion awakened us for stations

15. At which the days' eyes slept, looking on us.
They passed, nor did we pass from their condition,

16. As though, by our misery, luxuriating.
Then they bent back in a slant of tenderness toward us,

17. As if, for their darkness, apologizing.
So I taxed their heedlessness with mention of parting,

18. Whereupon, fearing separation, the blood turned white.
And she, having drunk the wine of her heavy eyelids,

19. Her tongue thick with it, incomprehensibly cried:
"O you who call my soul to return from the distance between us -

20. It has appeared, but you knew not that I knew!
Preoccupation with passion has blinded your heart to him

21. In every limb of whom is a passionate heart.
We struggle to complain though our tongues are silenced by it

22. And our eyelids, instead, speak.
Had I owned the secret, that day of love's beginning,

23. I would have kept what cannot be kept concealed."