ما يصبح العاذل معذورا — Abdul Mohsen Al Suri

The censurer never finds himself excused

unless you have found yourself forsaken.

So visit—even if only in pretense—and you will find his claim

as false in my judgment as you know it to be.

And do not ever rely upon my infatuation,

deluded in love.

For whenever a fire of resolve in me dies down

and the eye can see no light from it,

you would rightly behold my she-camel

carrying a furnace in her saddle-frame.

How many a parting whose pale camels have lifted

the trailing hem of a longing that dragged behind!

My patience is shattered only when

my heart is inhabited by you.

I shall surely flog the eye as a prescribed punishment

for what it did—and punish the eye at discretion too—

though some of the blows you dealt it may have sufficed

to humiliate and expose it publicly.

O master of the house in which everyone

who spends the night awakens drunk,

join me to the company upon a mature

yellow wine-steed that never falls short.

Its four become five: a hand adorned

with beauty, with signet rings and bracelets.

One endowed with a well-proportioned eye raises it with the cup—

an eye bearing a destined doom.

So do not ask me how I came to spend the evening, delighted

with both the bearer and the thing borne.

And do not fear what Time may do to me

after I sought aid from Mansur, the victorious,

and after his bounty charged back to me

and doubled its return time after time.

Ask the days about their vicissitudes:

in which of them have they become confined?

So that hopes may safely travel any path

or watering-place, secure from severance and drying up.

His aspirations brought forth the stars,

and they took the constellations as their homes,

directing generosity and death

as though they were the Seven Planets in their governance,

through a largesse which, were you to overtop the lofty summits,

would submerge even your great height—

like the sea, whose water’s depths you cannot fathom

however high you roll your garments to plunge in.

Yet this, in his presence, obliges praise,

and this obliges praise to be multiplied.

Tell Abu Nasr that what

you charged me to carry, I loaded upon the caravan.

I conveyed it journey after journey,

striving for it, thanked for my gratitude.

Praise accompanied thanks, extolling what

he bestowed; so I called to them both, “Travel!”

Every man’s generosity causes me to mention him,

but through this man I myself have become renowned.

May the condition of a hand never be changed

that hastens to change the conditions of others.