ألا كل ماشية الخيزلى — Al Mutanabbi

Behold, every woman with a languid, swaying gait

Is ransom for every she-camel with a swift stride,

And every swift Bujawi she-camel

That turns her neck—beauty of gait is not my concern.

But they are the cords of life,

And a stratagem against enemies and a warding off of harm.

I braved the trackless waste on them, as one gambles:

Either for this, or for that.

When they took fright, fine steeds led them onward,

And white swords and brown-shafted lances.

Then they passed through Nakhl, and in their caravan

Was freedom from need of all mankind—and of Nakhl.

And at evening, at al-Niqab, they offered us a choice:

Between Wadi al-Miyah and Wadi al-Qura.

And we asked them, "Where is the land of Iraq?"

They said, while we were at Turban, "There!"

And they swept through Hisma like the west wind,

Facing the quarter from which the east wind blows,

Aiming for al-Kifaf and the heart of the lowlands,

And al-Buwayra's neighbor, Wadi al-Ghada.

And they cut through Busayta as one slits a cloak,

Between the ostriches and the oryx,

To 'Uqdat al-Jawf, until they quenched

Some of their thirst with al-Jurawi's water.

And Sawar appeared to them with the dawn,

And al-Shaghur appeared to them with midmorning.

And their swift running reached al-Jumay'i at evening,

And al-Adari' in the morning, then al-Dana.

Oh, what a night upon A'kush—

With the land pitch-black and its waymarks hidden!

We reached al-Ruhayma in the midst of it,

And more of it remained than had passed.

Then, when we made our camels kneel, we planted our spears

Above our noble deeds and lofty glory.

And we spent the night kissing our swords

And wiping from them the blood of our foes,

So Egypt and those in Iraq would know,

And those in al-'Awasim, that I am the valiant youth,

And that I kept my word, and that I refused abasement,

And that I was defiant toward whoever was defiant.

Not everyone who speaks keeps his word,

Nor does everyone subjected to humiliation refuse it.

The heart must have weapons,

And judgment that splits solid rock.

And whoever has a heart like mine

Cleaves through the heart of doom toward glory.

On every road a young man takes,

The strides match the measure of his foot.

And the little lackey slept, unaware of our night,

And he had slept before from blindness, not from drowsiness.

And despite our nearness, between us lay

Trackless wastes of his ignorance and blindness.

Before the eunuch, I had surely believed

That heads were the seat of reason.

But when I looked at his intellect,

I found all reason in the testicles.

And how many laughable things Egypt holds!

But it is laughter like weeping.

There, a Nabataean from the people of al-Sawad

Teaches the lineages of the desert folk;

And a black man whose camel-like lip is half of him

Is told, "You are the full moon in the dark!"

And many a poem with which I praised the rhinoceros—

Between poetry and incantations.

That was no praise of him,

But it was a lampoon of all mankind.

And some people have indeed gone astray through their idols,

But through a wind-filled wineskin? No!

And those are silent, while this one speaks:

When they shake him, he farts or babbles.

And whoever does not know his own worth—

Others see in him what he does not see.