لنا من الدهر خصم لا نغالبه — Al Sari Al Raffa

We have in Time an adversary we cannot overcome;

what would Time lose if its calamities withdrew?

Whoever makes peace with it comes away wounded;

how, then, can one who fights it escape unharmed?

And were I safe from what its vipers inflict

on me, what its scorpions inflict would be slight.

Poetry has complained of a lion that assails it

when it displays its beauty, or an asp that pounces on it.

And its marvels have been veiled from their beholder,

and its wonders fettered short of their course.

How could their travelers not shun a path

where there is now a lion whose attacks are savage?

Alas for generosity's absence, its absent one nowhere to be found,

and the disappointment of letters, whose practitioner is spurned!

Are its sanctities to be violated by force,

and its budding-breasted maidens enslaved in humiliation?

Is it after my life has crumbled away over its beauties,

until its traveler grew frail with the coming of gray hair,

and innate talent made the water of its luster ripple within it,

so it emerged like brocade, its lengths burnished,

and it was like fruit whose fullest ripeness I had tested

through experience, so it reveals only its choicest parts—

a kind of magic I unveil before a company

to whom its composer and its bearer are alike,

its lines shining like streaks of lightning,

as though the page's gold itself were its scribe—

that its bordered cloaks are sullied by hands other than mine,

and its lineages blackened by people other than my own?

It is brocade: whenever our thoughts embroider from it

a cloak, some hand is sure to tug at it.

It is plunder: even if fire blazed around it,

its plunderer would race to it, wading through the fire.

Indeed, if its fugitive clung to al-Jawza,

its fugitive would not escape Abu Uthman's swift seizure.

He took captives; his early seizures left glimpses

still beloved, if his later deeds spared them.

When the armored warrior shuns some of what has been won

by his spears—a precious prize—he gives it away.

He forever raids the saddle of my poetry;

its hobbled beasts and its roaming ones take fright at it.

Yet no spearpoint is bloodied in it, though it has flashed

murderously, nor are the sword's striking edges bloodstained.

When he snatches a child from among our children,

the women mourning him rise with rhymes like his own.

Stand back from a meteor whose fury took wing

long ago; its piercing flame strips the sky's skin bare.

So turn aside from the torrent's path, and you will be safe,

before its wave crests pass you around as gifts.

For I will not offer its generous gifts to a people

after its led horses have been divided among them.

And do not stretch your hands toward al-Ayyuq

in ignorance, for no seeker has reached al-Ayyuq.

Do the two rich men have any excuse for seizing

jewelry whose usurper incurs the fullest curse?

Tell the vizier: shun the sin—it is plunder;

its plunderer unjustly transgressed against the one plundered.

May God not banish the pearls with which the two adorned you,

for many a youth's breast has been left bare of them;

and a mount whose praiser seeks truth

about its beauty, as its detractor seeks falsehood,

whose trainer is thrust aside by the hands of injustice,

whose rider is knocked aside by the spears of generosity.

Ibn Fahd has been despoiled of its beauties,

after his treasured possessions had been spent on them.

And you, without doubt, of his Yemeni robe's fine fabrics

are bare, just as his shoulders were stripped of them.

And how can you trail brocade already passed around

by people other than you, its trailing hems now threadbare?

Its brides displayed their beauty among them long ago,

and its stars shone among them for an age.

Let not the dinar of praise delight you when

its minter has not struck it in your name alone.

For your best quarry is that whose snares are lawful,

and your best wealth is that whose earnings are wholesome.

And if you listen closely to praise's warbling, then indeed

its warbler has arrived, and its cawing crow has sunk low.