طيف ألم فحيا عند مشهده — Albohtry

A dream-vision visited and greeted me when it appeared;

it had relieved the tormented lover of his bewilderment.

It crossed the sands, journeying by night through their ravines,

between their lower valleys and their uplands.

It spent the night roaming the wastes from either side of Iḍam,

until it found the one pierced through the heart, its slain victim.

They defied his admonisher's prohibition and clung to him—

tears that outdid his comforter in consolation.

Enamored of the one who cures him of sickness and makes him gravely ill

with it, who draws him near through union and keeps him far away.

And I have forbidden my heart—if only it would obey me—

from one of coy charm, rare and unrivaled in beauty,

from loving a dark-lipped beauty, smooth and white of cheek,

languid of eyelids, kohl-dark and black of eye;

like a sand dune rising high in its piled fullness,

like a slender bough, bending as it sways.

Poetry's rhymes shall surely journey by night in haste,

among its finest circulating verses and its far-roaming ones,

giving fair recompense for the beauty of his favors,

and for his first acts of bounty and his repeated gifts.

The giver of ransom, while the kings of the non-Arabs bow

to his branch, exalted among them, and his ancestral stock;

and he who ascends the height of glory, emulating

the station there of his Jarrāḥ and his Makhlid.

The utmost goal of our hopes, and our resource—the

greatest—for the nearest and farthest things we hope for.

We receive anew far-reaching, wide-spreading favor from

his generosity, and the white hand of kindness from his hand.

If people prove base, we live within his generosity;

or if people grow threadbare, we return to his renewal.

When men incur reproach in a calamity,

his hands overflow, and he excels in earning praise.

We thank no day but the day of his bounty

among us, and hope for no tomorrow but his tomorrow.

He shines joyfully in the wake of a good deed,

like the full moon reaching fullness in the hour of its auspicious stars.

When, in a quest, I attach a hope to him,

I see my undertaking's outcome before its outset.

O lord, who directs his character

in keeping with the precedents of his eminence and nobility,

you are the generous one, and have already offered, unprompted,

a promise—and every generous man fulfills it when it is due.

And Ibn Dāwūd's stalling is something you know,

if you do not tame him and loosen his tangled knots.