Sol 5.6

  1. O doves of al-Liwā, be gentle with him, for he is its very heart.

    Two steeds contend in his wager: your lamentation and his doom.

  2. He who offers you hospitality has water that cannot quench the birds,

    and grass that cannot fill the famished she-camels.

  3. Yet you fly where the hunter has stretched his snare,

    drawn so long that even the pinion feathers do not pass its reach.

  4. Do you deliberately rouse a man whose comforting companions have gone,

    abandoned even by his brother and his friends?

  5. I pass al-Liwā, my colt and I both lovesick,

    and question it—or rather, its very dust almost speaks:

  6. “What tribe are those white camels cleaving al-ʿAraḍana,

    facing you, their caravan stretching like a written line?”

  7. Among the departing litters is a pampered beauty, envied by those at home;

    a Thaʿlī veil drapes the gazelle-like cheek beneath her face-covering.

  8. She towers above the high, unyielding peaks when they lift her,

    save for his full-fed horses; even his saddle-girths fall short.

  9. We strove but could not overtake them, though our horses

    find easy and arduous going alike.

  10. They have sensed our longing, and so race onward,

    almost counting a day’s journey again on the morrow.

  11. Must every thirst drain away whatever would moisten it,

    and every sickness of mine lack someone to cure it?

  12. Time, you toyed with me until you left

    grave calamity and playful sport alike in my eyes.

  13. You have put far away those I love; yet if you are resolved

    to wrench me from them, then Saʿd and nearness to him

  14. are my desire—though what can a man’s desire avail him,

    or its allies, his whole party, in anything he attempts?

  15. I have taken the passage of glory between myself and him,

    leveling its mountains and tearing through its veils.

  16. Were it a deadly land, crossing it would become easy;

    were its water blood, drinking it would go down sweetly—

  17. to reach a moon before whom my gaze consoles itself from afar.

    How many a moon have its clouds concealed from me!

  18. Abū al-Qāsim, where the protected pasture’s bitter herbage

    dries up, while the sweetness of life beside you stays fresh—

  19. I speak, though no falsehood has ever clouded my love for you;

    yet a man may fail even someone he loves.

  20. A branch has flourished, rooted in the house of Ḍabba:

    your father is its bough, and you indeed its true scion—

  21. a loftiness in whose affection its non-Arabs delighted

    and whose company they enjoyed, while its Arabs raced to claim its glory.

  22. In you he saw what would make the lion, son of the thicket, forget his cubs:

    goodness repaid with goodness, or evil that he wards away.

  23. By nobility’s judgment, few indeed are his like,

    though age alone would give him many peers.

  24. If what kept me back from your two courts

    made me blame my fate, though blame availed nothing,

  25. and the hope of seeing you kept promising “soon” and clung to me,

    until fate’s habit was to seize my rightful due by force,

  26. then would that it were the nearer of my two places of visitation—one of you—

    while my family is its pasture and my home its spoil.

  27. I am not one whom the homelands of his house can beguile

    for some immediate pleasure whose aftermath is shame.

  28. If I hate humiliation and its abode,

    then the easiest thing to leave is even one I love.

  29. Visit us, for drought has struck us at a campsite

    whose vastness, for all its breadth, constricts the hills with heat.

  30. There, O house of Ḍabba, its lion is on a par

    with its lizard when each roams there seeking sustenance.

  31. They were fickle men; though one of them might prove generous,

    his mange would infect the sound, free-grazing herd, O Saʿd.

  32. Does it not grieve you that he should return empty-handed—

    a young man whose only gains are refinement and glory?

  33. You have advanced some men before me, but that does not harm me

    in your eyes, once butter is purified from the skin that churned it.

  34. A patchwork of ignorance distinguished and raised them,

    while proven merit and intelligence left me obscure.

  35. Adorn yourself with it, O Saʿd, for it is a necklace

    in which even its piercing adorns the finest pearl:

  36. a friend’s gift—if you make your affection the

    friendship due it despite his poverty; that alone is his lineage.

  37. His reproach raises him above the humiliation of distance,

    and his lofty ambition among mankind is his only fault.

  38. I have its sister with the vizier, gleaming in

    the darkness of night—or appearing while its meteors blush.

  39. She delights in the drawn-out softness of recitation,

    and speech’s nominative and accusative alike glory in her.

  40. She has her own beauty, but I want you as her intercessor,

    for the body’s best intercessor with me is its heart.

Sol 5.6