بكرت عليك مغيرة الأعراب — Al Sari Al Raffa

The Bedouin raiding band came upon you at dawn;

so guard your garments, O Abu al-Khattab.

Rabi‘a ibn Mukaddam has come to Iraq,

and ‘Utayba ibn al-Harith ibn Shihab.

Have we any doubt that they are those very two,

in murderous assault, not in the truth of their descent?

They brought you poetry from its homelands,

as merchants bring rare imported wares.

The poets’ marvels in what they brought

are coupled with the writers’ rarities.

Perdition to a people whose judgment

and minds remain in error and ruin!

Their share consists of cutting swords and spears,

and from manuscripts, the choicest spoils.

They launched the foulest raid on letters,

wounding the hearts of literature’s beauties.

Beware, then, the movements of two vipers in a wasteland,

and beware the movements of two lions in a thicket.

They do not rob a wealthy man; instead,

they plunder the fruits of minds.

If words at hand prove hard for them to find,

I am the one at whose door eloquence stands.

Or if they sink in abasement, I am the one

whose pavilions are pitched on the commanding height.

How often they sought my reach, yet found it beyond them

to catch anything but the dust I raised,

through helplessness; nor do slaves, when they race,

stand where their masters stand on the day of the wager.

Indeed, I defended poetry, though it belonged to a company

of rotting remains, except for their names and titles.

And I struck its pretenders away; my combat

was only for the form of letters.

Then the Nabataeans of al-Khalidiyya began claiming

my poetry, strutting in the embroidered finery of my garments.

The elders of the al-Za‘faran monastery—you see them

around the cross, with their backs bowed.

They settled in Dharamma, amid lowered eyes

that have never risen since creation, and humbled necks:

the homeland of bodies forbidden for their uncleanness

in the finest revealed scriptures and Book.

Of every tawny beast whose snout searches

for its sustenance, you see it in a gathered herd.

Slant-eyed, their voices low,

their heads are clothed by upraised tails.

Their boar guards the edges of their grazing herd,

and spends the night defending them, his tusks bared.

They were tended for the elder of al-Khalidiyya for a time;

rather, he had tended them for ages.

O Sa‘id, had you seen Hashim

in the monastery, unhonored by his companions,

pure abasement, straddling his staff,

ragged in his living, his cloak faded,

you would have sworn never to lengthen a turban

with sleek hanging ends and fringes.

They gained currency through instruments of obscenity, and imagined

that time had sped them onward and made me stumble.

A people who, when they seek kings for a favor,

have their turbans shaken out at the gates;

each middle-aged man’s mustaches flying

in two colors between the doorkeeper’s fingertips,

eyes lowered at the disgrace of exclusion, driven back

with bloodied brow by the gatekeepers’ scowls.

And two tongue-tied men challenged me to war,

so the points of my spears confronted them.

They gazed at my delightful poetry, then smeared with dust

the cheeks of its budding maidens, matched in age.

They drank it and acknowledged its sweetness;

yet many a sweet thing has become a scourge of torment.

In a raid in which the blade-edges were not notched

by blows, nor were the spears moistened with dye,

it left the wonders of my speech in exile,

taken captive, unable to find their way home:

wounded, though never struck by an Indian blade;

captives, though never carried on camel saddles.

Diction whose surfaces I polished, until it seemed,

among radiant verses, the pearls of a necklace.

And as though I had made flow over its pages

pure silver and unalloyed gold.

I wrought marvels in its adornment, so its reciters

find in it delight and astonishment.

I spent my youth upon it, never distracted

from its beauty by infatuation or youthful dalliance.

When its water shimmers on the page,

the breeze grows fragrant: that is the water of my youth.

The discerning listener divides his mind

between wonder at it and admiration.

Earnestness whose sparks fly, and humor

that makes loved ones tender toward loved ones.

How grievous it is to me to see its torn limbs

bleeding under an enemy’s claw and fang!

A fool assailed it with a witless raid

that sold Rum’s gazelles among the Bedouins.

O my little brother, you have consoled me for a noble piece

of it; console those of noble lineage for it too.

Console the noble—it is generosity’s honor;

their fingertips overflowed without reckoning.

They vied for its jewels and its striped cloaks,

and for it they received the finest reward.

They watered it with rain in full, drenching abundance,

and deemed watering it with mere dregs a sin.

I warn anyone composing a poem

of splendor against two companions of raiding and plunder:

two wolves who, when they sighted a traveling caravan,

brought upon it a day like the Day of Dhu’ab;

two foreign louts who, when church bells tolled, declared

their longing, or moaned like an aged she-camel,

in passion for the master of the offering; truly, it

branches from a lineage closely related to him;

and pleasure in the Gospel that reveals in them

wrath against al-Furqan and al-Ahzab.

I have cast the pact back to you both, on equal terms;

so brace yourselves for the crushing calamity that comes.

The catapults of satire are set up, though they see

how paltry are your station and ancestry.

When I cast a man’s covenant back to him,

let him prepare for my assault and punishment.

You two assailed a mountain whose peaks seem

white clouds above the white clouds.

And when its angry arrows strike you both,

they remain through the days, no longer angry.

You two assailed a mountain whose peaks seem

white clouds above the white clouds.

You raced in heedlessness, then retreated

back on your heels from the disgrace of the outcome.

You cast slander at the fragrant musk,

yet its fragrance surpasses the slanderer.

Let the scorching winds of my speech sear you both,

and the torrents of my ravines drown you both.

And let it travel by night to you with the south wind,

dipped in colocynth or bitter sap.

And let it rise from the mountain passes as though it were

the white blazes of lean-flanked steeds.

And I shall strike you both for your betrayal

with poetry’s swords that never fail to cut,

in succession, leaving you no respite—and is there

any day’s respite for dawn, the shepherd of night?

They cleave the mountains of al-Shaqiq; if they travel by night

to the right, they cross the deep waters of al-Zab.

Arrows I drive deep into you both, aimed

at the lurking places of grudges and raptures.

With it I show you both the world dust-darkened,

until the day is thought a day of fog.

So take heed, should there fail to blow upon you

ever a breeze from my harvest and my domain.

And let the liar, your peer, beware a hand

that spends the night yearning for liars’ throats.

How many an enemy’s torment I have prolonged

with sweet wounds dealt by the choicest speech!

I embroidered them before death, as

the gliding snake’s back is clothed in embroidery.

But for Abu al-Khattab, my rancor would have lasted

against misfortune that wrongs me, and my speech would have soured.

His qualities bestowed abundance, and

his right hand healed my skin of time’s scars.

It is enough that time made amends to me through him,

so I was spared my grievance and reproaches in his presence.