Sol 5.6

  1. Hide what you say from your brother, and do not let

    your heart’s secrets be like the secrets of the hand.

  2. Every age has one who holds back and one who advances—

    into battle, striking the brow of the proud.

  3. Yazid and Mukhallad passed away within a single dynasty;

    then time wheeled around again to Yazid and Mazyad.

  4. The closeness of names does not entail

    that the resemblance in deeds be any greater.

  5. The callow man is nothing like the flood when the two are compared,

    nor is the wolf called al-sayyid like the human lord.

  6. Love sends you roaming through the homelands—and how often

    have doves been snared upon swaying boughs.

  7. Humankind has suffered wrong; so contend alone, with your own hand,

    until you are numbered among the men who have perished.

  8. Whenever you are endowed with courage and eloquence,

    you make your home in glory’s quarter, in a lofty edifice.

  9. For among birds, lofty sovereignty and might

    are apportioned between their orators and their stately ones.

  10. And when death comes, you will not be spared from it by

    the coward’s flight or the evasions of those who turn aside.

  11. Under fate’s decree, the fettered man is like the free

    in whatever may befall, and the free is like the fettered.

  12. Thus death came upon the graceful doe at dawn—

    a pale gazelle grazing among the swaying plants.

  13. Fate may show you one allied with weakness as mighty,

    and render the mighty man’s peer a well-supported adversary.

Sol 5.6