Sol 5.6

  1. When Umm ʿAmr saw that I could not sleep,

    like one suffering a venomous bite, from debt and care,

  2. she said—and whoever speaks the truth is not to blame—

    “Indeed, the ʿAbdī youth, Harb ibn Hakam,

  3. dwells in an inexhaustible mine of generosity, if you visit him.

    How many an uncle and grandsire you have among them,

  4. through whom you have risen above the charge of men who plunge into peril!

    Al-Mundhir has extended for you, in lofty glory,

  5. a glory that has grown since the age of ʿĀd and Iram.

    And yours are standards raised high upon the peaks,

  6. and an honor God perfected—so it stands complete.

    How excellent a builder of noble deeds and renown!

  7. You are there whenever want sinks its teeth into men;

    you are springtime to near kinsmen and to all.

  8. And for a visitor among worthy peers, if calamity descends—

    the biting calamity grips with both its fangs, or clamps down.

  9. To you I complain of anxiety over a graver affair:

    it has made sleep shun me—and of a debt like sickness.

  10. You match the course of a swift, foremost racer,

    toward the farthest goal with sweeping, resolute stride.

  11. They know that, when the knotted crisis defies solution,

    and the earth is swathed in fog and black haze,

  12. and a gray famine is unleashed, deaf to every cry,

    you send the cloudburst plunging down and pour the steady rains—

  13. true when you covenant, a staunch defender of sacred bounds.

    By slaughtering camels in bounty, you clear away hunger in all its forms.

  14. And if some pall of affliction presses relentlessly,

    a strongly buttressed radiance from you dispels it.

  15. Behind it stands a pillar that has held them firm and never shifted.

    You are an ocean before whose surge another sea is dwarfed.

  16. When a rain-cloud wind or bitter chill lashes it,

    the ʿAdawlī ship flies like shards of stone cooking pots,

  17. between the two shores, fleeing a towering, overwhelming swell,

    whose crests are locked in struggle, whose dark deeps surge,

  18. when its sides collide in the crush,

    the ship glides clear of it through a broad breach.

Sol 5.6