رب منيف في ذرى منيف — Al Sari Al Raffa

Many a lofty one on the heights of another lofty one,

Its limbs are keen-edged swords,

Quivering beneath a dense cloudbank,

Like a howdah with musk-scented curtains,

For youths devoted to their passion,

Who had set out early for the customary hunt,

With one whose cloak and veil are jet-black,

Its white markings gleaming from its close-knit armor.

A peerless one we chose from thousands,

Backed by an army of deaths,

It bares daggers arranged in rows

That guarantee the companions food for guests.

You see it before its fierce charge,

Its claw stained from cartilage.

Its embrace of the doomed, anguished one

Is that of one neither kind nor tender.

It spotted, in death's hidden storehouse,

Embroidered like a mantle with woven stripes,

Smiling, revealing the rain's shed tears,

A herd of oryx, like polished pearls.

Winter had handed them over to summer,

So they grazed in autumn's bounty.

Then it eyed them with a noble youth's two eyes,

And stretched out like a lance being straightened,

And swooped to kill like one plunging from a height.

Then pierced between the upper chest and the rib-tip,

Like a smith's sharply pointed spearhead,

The pursuit of one neither flagging nor weak,

And the grip of a tyrant ruthless with them.

And returned, now beyond rebuke,

On a day of cold that cuts off noses.

Snow falls away like carded cotton,

Or like its powdered camphor,

From its two ears and the side of its neck,

Like a necklace and earrings breaking apart.

So through its bounty we live in plenty,

And ease, with fluttering foliage close at hand,

Amid dried meat and sliced roast meat:

A blessing from the Merciful, compassionate toward us.