Sol 5.6

  1. Hudhaym, you have heeded the admonition of the nights.

    What have this world's calamities to do with me—and I with them?

  2. They struck Mudar with the third hearthstone—the crowning calamity—

    at broad noon, and it mourned four noble virtues.

  3. The dwellings of glory stand deserted and empty;

    within them resounds the echo of bygone years.

  4. Every familiar companion has left them, save a hoarse-voiced mourner

    amid the campsite's effaced traces, its decayed and weatherworn remains.

  5. I stood there, biting my right hand in anguish,

    until the violence of my biting made my left hand bleed.

  6. I linger over it, wailing aloud as though I were

    a snake-bitten man among acacias and wild lote trees.

  7. The finest part of its once-adorned dwelling has been stripped bare

    by roaming herds of pale gazelles wandering all around.

  8. Many a fair-faced warrior returned with white swords turned red,

    the white blades cleaving dark-haired napes.

  9. Then you hear his comrades there raise a battle cry

    that shakes the twin peaks looming in the mirage.

  10. When the chestnut charger galloped, they ringed him—

    warriors like serpents, from his paternal and maternal kin.

  11. When they mounted their charging steeds, you would imagine them

    mountains mounted upon mountains.

  12. Though Time brought them forth only at the last,

    they surpassed generations both latter and former.

  13. Alone, the descendant of creation's Guide spared no effort

    before the host of the godless woman's son, the man of error.

  14. That morning the Prophet's grandson, the noble scion of Fihr,

    became the target of an engulfing cloud of arrows.

  15. Whenever their arrows struck him,

    their arrowheads shattered against arrowheads already lodged there.

  16. He forced his way through them while the striking of heads roared

    as haltered camels roar.

  17. Whenever he was made to suffer humiliation, his blade shot forth

    like a leaping flame—the flickering tongues of vipers.

  18. The saddle surged beneath him, though its rider sat firm;

    upon it he wheeled through the battlefield's narrow bounds.

  19. The armor tightened around his shoulders until

    he split the doubled layers of closely woven mail.

  20. How could it hinder one swift to seize and overtake,

    though its linked, trailing rings lay upon him?

  21. And how could he be caught within the snares of death—

    a warrior who crushed squadron upon squadron?

  22. In losing him, the women of Nizar lost a peerless youth—

    the champion of their young men, the man among men:

  23. a warrior who welcomed visiting delegations with a cheerful face,

    whose qualities were gentler than the north wind.

  24. Their caravan mounts passed by him lightly laden,

    and he sent them away with vessels heavy with gifts.

  25. I marvel: he dies of thirst while the ever-flowing Eu—

    —phrates, sweet to drink, brims with limpid water.

  26. That water was lawfully his—how could the clan of Harb

    bar him from water that was lawfully his?

  27. Then say: may the foul brood of Harb be condemned to thirst,

    though they leave it fully sated with stagnant, fetid water.

  28. He falls upon the sands, upon a noble face,

    though never before had stars fallen upon the sands.

  29. He was struck down—how could the sun's own brother rise

    when the sun itself had not yet inclined toward setting?

  30. Raised aloft from him is something like the moon at perfect fullness—

    a noble one, upon the tall, straight spears.

  31. And there remains a body like the disk of the sun,

    scorched in the blazing heat of noonday.

  32. Many a sheltered woman of Taha's pure household

    emerged from the curtained chambers, blazing with anguish.

  33. She burst into sobs after a life of coy, pampered grace—

    alas for such weeping, following such delicacy!

  34. Oh, what tempests! They stormed and rose,

    with tumults that had never crossed my mind.

  35. A mourning herald struck the ear of Time with a death cry

    and rent the hearing of ancient, crumbling bones,

  36. proclaiming far and wide that the full moon had been blotted out:

    an eclipse overtook it at the height of its fullness.

  37. The celestial shrine al-Durah—not an earthly tomb—should have opened for him;

    yet grave-earth was heaped upon the crescent moon.

Sol 5.6