وفاؤكما كالربع أشجاه طاسمه — Al Mutanabbi

Your loyalty, you two—like the campsite, whose effaced traces grieve most—

is to join my lament; and tears soothe most when they stream.

I am nothing but a lover; for every lover,

the less faithful of his two devoted friends is the one who reproaches him.

One unfit for love may dress himself in its guise,

and a person may take as companion someone who does not suit him.

May I decay as the ruins decay, if I do not stand beside them

as a miser stands whose ring is lost in the dust.

Grief-stricken, the women who reproach me in love keep clear of me,

as a prudent handler avoids an unbroken horse.

Stop: let your first glance repay my life-blood

with a second; whoever destroys a thing must make restitution.

May God water you and greet us through you; there are only

blossoms upon the pale camels, and the curtained litters are their calyxes.

What need have the travelers around you in the darkness

of a moon? Whoever has you does not lack one.

If the eyes gain a glimpse of you,

through it the exhausted riding camels revive, even those unable to rise.

A beloved whom Beauty itself seems to have loved

and favored—or its distributor was unjust in apportioning beauty.

Spears of al-Khatt stand in the way of his capture,

while the noble women of every tribe are taken captive for him.

By day, the dust of horses becomes the nearest of his veils,

and the last is the fragrance of incense that clings to him.

My eye found no parting I witnessed unfamiliar,

nor taught me anything my heart did not already know.

Let my enemies not suspect me, for I

have grazed on death until its bitter gourds grew sweet to me.

What made the man who mourns youth young is what makes him gray;

how can he avoid it, when his builder is his destroyer?

Life's fullness lies in youth and what follows it,

and the vanished color of the beard and the color that arrives.

People have not dyed their white hair because it

is ugly, but because jet-black hair is the finest.

And lovelier than all the freshness of youth

is rain from a lightning-cloud within a pavilion, whose flashes I watch.

Upon it are meadows no cloud has woven,

and boughs of mighty trees whose doves have never sung.

And above the borders of every double-faced cloth

is a strand of pearls its stringer never pierced.

You see the creatures of the wild at peace upon it:

one adversary fights its adversary, yet makes peace with it.

When the wind strikes it, it billows, as though

its full-grown steeds were roaming and its lions stalking.

In the image of the crowned Byzantine is abasement

before a radiant-browed man whose only crowns are his turbans.

The mouths of kings kiss his carpet,

while his sleeve and knuckles are too exalted for them.

Standing before him whose cautery cures disease,

and whose brands lie between the ears of every mighty bull-camel.

Their sword-pommels lie beneath the elbows, out of awe,

and his resolves are more piercing than the blades within scabbards.

He has two armies, of horses and birds; when he hurls

them against an army, only its skulls remain.

Their caparisons are the robes of every tyrant,

and every rebel's muzzle lies beneath their tread.

For dawn's light has wearied of how often they alter it,

and night's blackness has wearied of how often they crowd it;

and the spears have wearied of having their foreparts crushed,

and India's steel has wearied of their blows against it.

A cloud of eagles; beneath them advances

a cloud whose keen swords water them whenever they seek rain.

I traversed Time's vicissitudes until I met him,

on the back of a resolve whose legs were made strong.

Deadly wastes where a wolf's own soul would not accompany it,

nor would a raven's flight-feathers carry it there.

Then I beheld a full moon whose like the full moon never sees,

and addressed a sea whose swimmer sees no shore.

I grew angry on his behalf when I saw his qualities

with no one to describe them, while poetry's babblers raved.

Whenever I would set my course for a distant land,

I traveled by night; I was the secret, and night its keeper.

Glory has unsheathed Sayf al-Dawla—the Sword of the State—bearing his battle-mark;

neither does glory conceal him, nor do blows notch him.

His baldric rests upon the radiant king's shoulder,

and his hilt is in the hand of the Almighty of the heavens.

His enemies fight him, though they are his slaves,

and hoard wealth, though it is his spoils.

They deem Time mighty, though Time is beneath him,

and deem death great, though death is his servant.

Whoever named him Ali, 'the Exalted,' was surely just,

and whoever called him a sword surely wronged him.

Not every sword can sever heads with its edge

and cut through Time's hardships with its generosity.