Sol 6.1

  1. O water of Līnah, if only you quenched my burning thirst,

    your pools would be cups of wine for me.

  2. The love-stricken never swerves from love's path,

    even were reproach a sword's cutting edge.

  3. How can he forget, when nothing enters his hearing

    except a yearning cry or the lament of doves,

  4. until the heart seems to have drawn its veil

    to ward off the reproachers' nightly visitations?

  5. Indeed, I offered my ribs to forgetfulness—

    burning hot—but it found in them no dwelling place.

  6. What harm to one who visits the jealous man face to face,

    if he visits in a robe of dreams?

  7. Pass through al-Liwā if you wish to see

    the eyes of oryxes and the necks of gazelles.

  8. And linger in gazing at the curtained chambers, for among them

    is a figure that makes the worship of idols lawful.

  9. They shot at us with piercing, poisoned shafts,

    and I wished I had kissed the archer's arrow.

  10. And they concealed a spreading dye upon their hands,

    and its counterpart in the heart is a growing love.

  11. The veils are not what their name suggests; rather,

    on the day of farewell, they are quivers for arrows.

  12. Between me and the full-breasted maidens is an appointed meeting

    that casts my rein into the hand of gray hair.

  13. The dream-phantom visiting my bed does not withdraw

    from me while a wing of darkness lies upon my temples.

  14. And time, with its two colors, dyes my two locks,

    both of them, with dawn and darkness.

  15. Once you were curly, lowly buhmā grass;

    so by what water have you become the white blossom of thaghām?

  16. Do the nights cast lots against me, after

    my fierceness and unruliness had fettered their hands?

  17. My riding camels frolic among Iraq's buttercups,

    while my resolves graze in the meadows of al-Shām.

  18. I have a waterskin in the bellies of swift she-camels,

    that gives drink when the swelling flood betrays the meadows.

  19. And when the gleaming bowls divorce the forenoon,

    the blades bend over withers and hump.

  20. Many a mature, high-humped she-camel, passed over by hospitality,

    had her allotted share left to the lot-arrows.

  21. Indeed, since I bridled with contentment's rope

    my greed, my traveling and my staying have become alike.

  22. So deserts to me are like palaces, and my setting out

    is like my holding back, and wealth like destitution.

  23. I meet the sons of this age, crying rebukes,

    as camel-drivers scold dumb livestock.

  24. Their bodies have no feeling within their precincts,

    and their hearts are bereaved of understanding.

  25. Enough for me, now that I stand alone among them,

    are you, Abu al-Hasan, my true brother and twin.

  26. She conceived us on a night of terror—

    the mother of radiant virtues—in a pregnancy carried to term.

  27. And the wet nurse of eminence took charge of nursing us,

    for two years she never counted toward weaning.

  28. Until, once the literary arts had their girdle drawn tight,

    they were wedded to lofty-nosed noblemen.

  29. They take the virgins of meaning captive wherever

    they launch a raid, and it is not forbidden.

  30. This is genuine lineage, while others

    strut with pride in their maternal and paternal uncles.

  31. If separation could rust the blade of my brotherhood,

    I would polish it with reunion and visits.

  32. But I, while separation gnashes its fang,

    smile, revealing love's ever-smiling mouth.

  33. By day you are my remembrance and my contemplation,

    and by night, my dreams and the phantom of my sleep.

  34. If some men form a necklace of choice pearls,

    you are the necklace and the thread of every necklace.

  35. I fall short of your noble, front-running steeds,

    and surrender my bridle on the day of the race.

Sol 6.1