Sol 5.6

  1. How can I remain patient, parted from the wine-cups, whenever

    The garden stumbles in the trailing skirts of the breeze,

  2. and the upland narcissus gazes with its eyes,

    and the rose unveils a lovely face,

  3. and the stream’s wrist appears, whereupon

    the wind traces lines of tattoos upon it?

  4. Soon sorrows will learn which wine

    has swept them from our souls and bodies.

  5. A wine-jar’s daughter grazed in the wilderness of my soul;

    there she races through it like a male ostrich at full run.

  6. She ripened nobly in gardens whose planting

    was the work of noble men; hence she took her name from the vineyards.

  7. I roamed among the groves; then my tears streamed forth

    for doves weeping over parting from a dear companion—

  8. their inarticulate tongue speaking plainly in a subtle way,

    speech pieced together from fragments of speech.

  9. Toward him a broad-cheeked, lean she-camel sped me,

    journeys consuming her as chopped fodder is consumed.

  10. You could see the wind behind her, bewildered,

    caught between her headlong gallop and her measured trot.

  11. All day I folded up the wastes with a lām-shaped limb of hers,

    stamping them with mīm after mīm.

  12. Thus she reached him, emaciation having taken its toll;

    she now steps upon a battered, broken shank.

  13. And only briefly, in the trackless wastes, did I enjoy

    a hump like a massed bank of cloud.

Sol 5.6