أعبيد يا ذات الهوى النزر — Bashar Ibn Burd

O ʿUbayd, whose love is scant,

your affection weighs upon my back.

If you, O ʿAbbād, were true

in love, your state would draw close to mine.

You were girded with patience to forgo visiting us,

but my patience for not seeing you dwindles.

My eye hopes to find its solace in you,

and wealth for itself from within poverty.

You are the soul's desire when it is alone,

and its conversation in hardship and ease.

So scrupulously refrain, if you are one who believes

in God, O ʿAbbād, from forsaking me.

If you knew what I have suffered through you,

you would ransom me with ties of blood and marriage.

Nor would you withhold a cooling draught

of saliva from a sweet mouth with cool, gleaming teeth.

I concealed my love for you, not revealing it,

for two years in humiliation and secrecy,

until, when concealment had bequeathed me

sickness, and my breast grew tight with love for you,

I tormented a soul that knew no safety,

without indecency or foul speech.

You are more desirable to my soul, were I to burden it,

and to all within it, than the Night of Decree.

I rave about you awake—they know it—

and spend the night longing at the thought of you,

while you turn about, carefree,

amid silk-and-wool cloth, Qūhī fabrics, and perfume.

O ʿUbayd, will you not remember a young man

whom you enslaved with your bewitching talk?

Death has its causes, and your love

is a cause of my death, a tightly twisted cord.

Indeed, I have learned the way to your affliction,

while my nail yearns for someone other than you.

So I blunted my hand to keep it from harming you,

and kept it resting upon my chest,

in longing for you, for what I hope for,

and fearing you would cut off my excuse,

because of a firm resolve that overcame my attempts at union,

and an affection that exceeded my means.

Indeed, the lovers whose

reason fluttered toward women who knot their veils

hoped, and feared that their lives held

rough terrain—and never escaped that rough terrain.

They descended into the valley of death when they fell in love,

then followed one another, in pairs after single ones.

And likewise, from the valley of their fidelity,

I have come to lean forward on a journey,

going onward, held in pledge by their malady;

so their souls race to meet them.

O friend, do not hasten to reproach me;

you will pass the night knowing my plight.

And know of my heart, when you recall it,

that it is enthralled by the chamber's egg-white maiden.

Love's scorpions have crouched

within it, as a nestling crouches in its nest,

on the day the maidens circled her

like stars circling the full moon.

I have not forgotten her in late afternoon, when

the day's sun had entered life's most decrepit age,

and her tears, from what she concealed about us,

flowed over her cheeks and upper chest.

Then all that was stealthily slain and changed

by an age that passed her onward to another age,

and the whiteness of a day after its night,

drawing near to the familiar with strangeness.

What I once knew I no longer recognized

in her, except promises and betrayal.

And the soul draws near, with its burning embers,

to her; the daughter of Time circles it.

I truly fear, from remembering her,

sudden death when I am unaware,

from a palpitation whose bout, if it lasted

a brief pause in milking, would exhaust my life.

But delayed was the day of one held in pledge

to his death; he kept his senses despite being broken.

Yet surely there will befall him what befell

one day the companion of ʿUrwah al-ʿUdhrī.

So if you hear of someone dead from grief,

for whom Death came early, not journeying by night,

then weep over my grave, grief-stricken,

though little indeed will you weep over my grave.

Then be certain that I am the one stricken by you,

whose death came swiftly with a sigh.