Sol 5.6

  1. Wretched is the age, clothed in its evildoers,

    that exchanges good men for the wicked.

  2. How can you seek purity amid its turbid troubles,

    when its children have been molded by turbidity?

  3. How many a watering place has the heart yearned to reach,

    though every coming to water truly ends in departure.

  4. Take no delight, my soul, in anything imagined:

    how many a blessing has led to ruin;

  5. how many a blessing was fashioned, then became a curse,

    while one neighbor is excluded for another neighbor’s sin.

  6. This is Damascus, and her fire is paradise to me;

    away with her—a paradise within a fire!

  7. She has done it; yet since she rose, she has reached the utmost

    in beauty, while imperfection lies in decline.

  8. How many watering places in Damascus stand open to all,

    yet their limpid water has been marred by bitterness.

  9. How many gardens in Damascus are fresh and blooming,

    yet their bloom shows no radiance.

  10. How many boughs in Damascus sway gracefully,

    yet her leafy bowers bear no blossoms.

  11. How many fruits in Damascus look delectable,

    yet have none of the savor of fruit.

  12. How many palaces in Damascus serve as dwellings,

    yet her dwellings have no moons.

  13. How many stars rise within her pavilions,

    yet far from it—her stars are not radiant.

  14. And her intimate friend—I thought him like a toothpick,

    because of a defect, or an intimacy born of shame.

  15. How often I sought a companion for night talk and found him,

    yet in the heart he was like a nail.

  16. From every tyrant, stubborn in his own opinion—the

    crooked one has come like a ravening beast,

  17. changing color and writhing, as though he were the

    chameleon, the mangy she-camel, or fire.

  18. Each reserves his pleasures for his own self.

    O you who reserve yourself for fruits!

  19. Indeed, I spent my time there terrified:

    I yearn, then fall at the brink of a crumbling precipice.

  20. In her days I was made to drink grief while thirsty,

    and they drank—but from the blood of the righteous.

  21. She passed, and her death-decrees passed over me; already

    they had cast me into a vast, advancing host.

  22. An age in which the companionable heart is tormented—

    it has cast off every rein amid grief and shame,

  23. clothed in rancor yet naked, just as

    it stripped modesty from itself and became the naked one.

  24. I befriended it, but its character turned savage;

    it was as though I were in a tract whose face was my daylight.

  25. I offered it civility; it erupted in boorishness:

    innate stocks show their mettle in the arena.

  26. Indian in her nature, Zanjī in

    her taste, Arab in vengeance.

  27. By reason’s reckoning, a pedigree whose tally grows

    through multiplication—in worth and measure.

  28. Were she not of al-ʿIrāqī’s lineage,

    she would be a rustic, never deep-rooted like al-Qārī.

  29. The wind of time brought one bearing traits like his;

    the age’s very nature is enmity toward the freeborn.

  30. An age like a bitch, tender to her pup,

    yet spurning the proud might of the fierce lion’s cub.

Sol 5.6