Sol 5.6

  1. The tears found solace over my tormented heart—but has it found solace?

    What business have fire and tears meeting one another?

  2. So fear no reproach from me, you two, for I possess

    a heart that, whenever told “Be still,” grows restless.

  3. Indeed, whoever offers my ears, in love,

    reproach is like one entrusting water to a sieve.

  4. They said the down upon his cheek would undo his beauty;

    instead, that cheek-down fettered beauty and chained it.

  5. It is proof of my nobility that love has made me wither,

    for the lances of al-Khatt ennoble the slender.

  6. Let me die; I was not the first to draw near

    to beauty until he melted and wasted away.

  7. The full moon never ceases striving to approach

    the sun, until it hides away and vanishes.

  8. Truly, I only grow more humbled

    before you, while you grow ever more coquettish.

  9. Bestow on us, amid these partings, the mercy

    of union with you, O you endowed with beauty entire.

  10. It seemed fair that we be exposed for loving your face, for I

    have seen a lover’s exposure become an adornment.

  11. Your eye’s lid is called a jفن—a sheath—because it

    is the sheath that holds a blade forged from your glances.

  12. Slaying is so ingrained in those glances that, if they

    gazed toward a rock, they would engender death within it.

  13. The deadliest thing in you is a mouth of notched teeth;

    thus I see that the keenest sword is the notched one.

  14. Your mouth is a frontier stronghold: if I should seek to sip it,

    though it lies as plunder, abandoned to the tooth-sticks—

  15. oh, my grief! You have preferred every lowly thing

    to a lover—even arak and isḥil wood.

  16. How many a delicate pinch, amid an embrace,

    has left the brocade of your cheek like velvet;

  17. and how many a kiss, stolen from its watcher,

    with which I marked your unpointed script until it was fully pointed.

  18. I tasted my days: their bliss,

    and life’s honey in them, were bitter colocynth.

  19. The days’ false gilding has never pleased me;

    would that I had become oblivious to them.

Sol 5.6