فيم ابتداركم الملام ولوعا — Albohtry

Why do you rush so obsessively to blame?

Have I wept for anything but a ruined campsite and dwellings?

They reproached me, but did not turn my heart from love,

and called, but found the sorrowing man unwilling to listen.

O dwelling, changed by time; calamities have scattered

from you your once-united company.

If I had tears to adorn my anguish,

I would have let them loose in your two courtyards.

Do not solicit my tears; none have been left

in my eyes by the burning grief of parting.

And a woman of languid glances, whose heart is sickened

by mention of covetous desires, so chaste and content is she.

She appears, and the ardent lover reveals his secret

deliberately; and she leaves the steadfast man distraught.

Her firm resolves almost held back my tears,

when she saw the dreadful horror of parting.

Abu Sa'id al-Samiti has firm resolves

before which time's calamities show submission.

A king who gives away what his hands possess,

in whom all the means of glory are gathered.

He surpassed kings in generosity and bounty,

and ushered in the rising of generosity's star.

Vigilant at heart, he has become to his foes

a destroying doom, and springtime to supplicants.

Generous in nature, he defies reproachers

in noble deeds, and obeys generosity.

Lavish in gifts, he preserves noble deeds

through his hands' bounty, while squandering inherited wealth.

Visited in turn by prosperity and adversity, he was not

created fearful of calamities or prone to panic.

You meet him with his sword and spearhead dripping,

and the fingers of his palm, with bounty's dew and fresh blood.

Listening keenly for the echo of a cry calling him to battle,

to answer the caller's voice that reaches him.

Indeed, he passes the night, finding none for himself

but the keen Mashrafi sword as bedfellow.

Wakeful as a viper, he has banished sleep

from his eyes, and tastes no slumber.

God bless you, son of Yusuf—what a noble youth,

who gave noble deeds their withheld due!

You awakened in Nabhan a glory that has always been

exalted of old for praiseworthy deeds.

And though you built glory's summits for them, they have never

ceased to be glory's roots and branches.

A people: when they don armor for an encounter,

their honor dons them there as armor.

They give their horses no hope of wheeling away,

if their battle-ram is struck and falls slain.

God bless you on Babak's day, a horseman,

a hero hammering at death's gates.

When he came against you, leading a mountain-like army,

so dense and massed that one could walk upon it,

you divided them among spearpoints and sword-edges,

until you annihilated their hosts by dispersing them,

in a cramped battlefield where you would think the spears,

when bent between ribs, were ribs themselves.

The spearpoints and sword-edges never flag there,

prostrating and bowing at the horsemen's necks.

You adorned it with the radiance of a head that

wearing helmets for battle had made bald.

When they saw you, their plans fell apart,

and the champion of their fury lay overthrown.

You summoned them to death with the edges of sword-steel,

and all came to you, hastening in submission,

until you captured their Badhdh and left it

with its flank given over to humiliation, though once impregnable.

And at Dhu al-Kula', you kindled from the spears' firestick

a war avid for the destruction of armored champions,

when you assailed the Romans there with lean horses

giving the horsemen their gallop at full stretch.

You were the path to destruction, since you were,

in seizing souls, an intercessor with death,

in a battle whose aftermath left upon them

the vultures of the wastelands and eagles, settled there.

All this—and what adversary have you confronted

without making a spring gush from his jugular veins?