Sol 6.1

  1. My passion for the curves of slender boughs

    has incited tears against my stricken eye.

  2. I begin to pine, seared by a slender waist;

    what have I done with my stolen heart?

  3. How can I reach a slender one who shuns me,

    whose beauties transcend all description?

  4. A young gazelle who, whenever despair checks our hearts,

    bends those hearts with his curved temple-lock.

  5. He appears, though spears conceal him; his face

    lies among them, between gauze canopies and curtains.

  6. They said, “You defied the reproachers”—but it is no

    condition of ardent love to obey harsh rebukes.

  7. He drove sleeplessness from my eyelid; how should I not

    weep for the nights of my banished slumber?

  8. And my inmost being kept faith with him; there is no

    one free to dispose of that endowed dwelling.

  9. And I am jealous of glances upon him, for he is

    a beauty that leads every chaste person's gaze astray.

  10. O driver of the travelling litters, you trace lines

    in solitude on the pages of every sheet.

  11. A tale of the two clans' names; how fine

    their deeds were—what letters came from them!

  12. Who will bring me the tribe's full moon, who does not break

    my covenant, while the tribesfolk are not away?

  13. And it is as though the sun in a clouded sky, between concealment

    and unveiling, were a face showing through a veil.

  14. And many a night of a tryst, its darkness

    was like the blackness of a heart grieving at separation.

  15. And the full moon in the robes of cloud is like

    a dark-lipped woman beneath head-wraps and sheer veils.

  16. I have come to dwell in two opposites: the tears of the love-maddened,

    weeping one, and the fire of the circling, anguished wanderer.

  17. So the heart dwells among stones with its gazelle,

    and the eye is in water, with leafy shade above it.

  18. What have I to do with time's calamities and its vicissitudes?

    I have been afflicted by the injustice of calamities and reversals.

  19. They robbed me of my brothers, until they exhausted

    among them, my hoard of inherited wealth and my path.

  20. And they left me empty-fingered, destitute

    of every companion of youth and intimate friend.

  21. They burdened me with heavy loads in the debt of lofty honor,

    knowing that debt comes through imposed obligation.

Sol 6.1