إن تخطاني زماني — Abdul Mohsen Al Suri — Saqi

If my age should pass me by,
pressing onward with vicissitudes,
your love betrays my whereabouts, fearing
that those two might forget me.
Where can I hide, now that
it has shown them where I am?
And those two—so long as it does not
leave me—will never leave.
And all my experience of him has come
through my being cast aside and humiliated.
Did you not once regard me
as at least something of what you once thought me?
Do not leave your secret hostage
between my eye and my tongue.
Or else say that you do not hold
me answerable for what those two may do.
O you who take from my heart as your mount
a headstrong steed, prone also to balking,
do not risk yourself: it is
not a mount whose reins can be mastered.
Yet there is a clear way
to consolation, radiant and bright,
drawing its light from the gifts
of Abu ʿAmr’s fingertips—
he of the white hands, whose benefactions go
as twins before the eye.
Were it not that they are so near,
they would be stars in conjunction.
Not one of them appears
to us without a second beside it.
No two hands can equal what his hands pour forth
with the hand of generosity.
Many an affair in his keeping
was spoiled by his setting my own affair right.
His court has gathered the bounty-seekers
from far and near.
And noble, full-grown white camels never kneel
except among noble white camels.
A possessor of benefaction; never was
anyone able to claim a favor over him.
He looked upon the world with the eyes
of an ascetic, languid in his desire to acquire.
It is a dwelling that his hand has brought down
to the lowly station of an abode of disgrace.
How can my praise be sent abroad
when the two horizons are too narrow for it?
In lofty deeds he has never ceased to be
the worthiest of poetry’s virgin meanings—
if poetry will obey me concerning him
after having so long defied me.
And to whom else, when through him the two
races—humankind and jinn—have come into accord?