عز الجفون وذلة الصبر — Abn Alsaati

The eyelids' pride and patience's abasement

have decreed that I must submit to estrangement.

Before Kazima, I did not know

that fidelity is treachery's vanguard.

Had I asked, after stopping there,

about one who had gone, I would have asked about my patience.

I weep for the three soot-black stones after the parting

of those departing, with four reddened eye-corners.

Now it is time, in their playground, for

the rows of teeth to pity my scattered tears.

O Kaaba of beauty, you were raised

only to earn sin, not reward.

You taught my tears the pilgrim's striving, then took

patience away from you, according to the rite of departure.

And longing has come of age; what need, then,

has the heart for its nurse or the lap?

Had you been just toward a lovesick man,

you would have spared the waist the rump's oppression.

Indeed, with the sword of your glance you struck

a love-stricken man; the eyelid suffered a break.

Its languor brings me revelation; upon

Harut it sent down the verse of sorcery.

And you smiled at my tears; no wonder

the flowers smile at morning rain clouds.

And parting is a battlefield; your gaze, in

raiding hearts, wins the victory.

Nothing in your cheeks startled me there

but the truce between water and embers.

And indeed, by your command to love ardently,

consolation [uncertain reading] was forbidden by that command.

O night I won at al-Na'f,

you were none other than the Night of Decree.

And you are the sun; why did you ride a stretch

of night, though it is the full moon's mount?

We spent the night; in the tents' gathering places no

night-talk was recounted there from [unclear: al-sathmar].

I am given your saliva to drink, and it is clear

tawny wine in a cup of pearls.

And you punished me with your glance when you saw

that the prescribed penalty applies to the wine-drinker.

And the clan, like the dead, reassures one

whose flank-muscles quiver with terror.

And the mantle erases what you wrote with the

tips of your tresses in the dust.

And it is as though your eyelids stole from

your two flanks the air of pride and drunkenness.

And in the blackness of night's heart there flickers

lightning, for fear of dawn's vanguard.

And dawn's secrets had never passed

through night's mind or thought.

Had it not slept, its stars would have been blotted out,

as the sun rose from her curtained chamber.

And it was as though sleep had bound, with the thread

of dawn, the Eagle's foremost flight-feathers within it.

Until it appeared, its countenance resembling

the vizier's face, beaming with gladness.