Sol 6.1

  1. Do not seek a man's malice, worse than disease.

    And strike sparks with forbearance, not with rancor.

  2. Why do I, when you are weak and not to be feared,

    spare you, while you tear at me without mercy?

  3. Easy! For the basins of war are brimming

    with deadly poison—bitterness beneath sweetness.

  4. Was it when you bested someone who uttered a rhyme,

    while my poetry prevailed over tribe after tribe,

  5. that you made your eye squint from hatred of us?

    Had I branded you, it would have been straight again.

  6. Seek my favor, and do not seek to quarrel with me.

    The shriveled weakling cannot bear my burdens.

  7. I am al-Muraʿʿath, hidden from no one;

    the sun has risen with me for those near and far.

  8. The caliph becomes like me in his fine qualities;

    but you are not like me, so sleep, you chewer of water!

  9. Indeed, when men's anuses preoccupy them, I

    have ample paths and readily rise to a formidable task.

  10. Delegations linger, while I am summoned before their turn

    to receive gifts, though I did not attend at Raqqa.

  11. If Yahya were a Tamimi, I would have spoken ill of him;

    but he is a Qurashi, a fledgling of Batha.

  12. Yahya is a Hashimi youth whose flank is unassailable;

    so he is not blamed, even if he races with sheep.

  13. A fine youth of Quraysh! We do not drive him away

    from the Prophet, even if he is a son of Kallāʾ.

  14. His roots have always been in the heart of Batha,

    well-born between papyrus and halfa grass.

  15. O lion of the tribe when they go to a feast,

    and fox of the tribe when they advance against foes!

  16. Do not take me for a cock you spent the night stroking

    so it would rise, while it refuses anything but sleep.

  17. People have cried "Glory be to God!" at my branding of Abu Umar;

    have you, then, held back at the reciters' cries of praise?

  18. I branded some men with my branding iron, so they could not endure

    the punishment, though they had crept up with a dire scheme.

  19. And sometimes one close to me goes too far, and I say to him—

    if he is of my band or an offspring of my forefathers—

  20. Say whatever falsehood and lies come to your mind:

    my forbearance is deaf, but my ear is not.

  21. The wretch capers; were you to cast off his loincloth,

    a brander's marks would show on his sore anus.

  22. You kept thrusting with the accursed thing into an anus,

    until you bought yourself doom in a shitter's ass.

  23. Why did you not protect your mother, sons of Waʾdan,

    from the branded fellow as he went by night with a thick glans?

  24. You spent the night asleep, while the foreign brute spent it shaking her,

    on a moonlit night, bright as dawn's light.

  25. Woe to his mother! That Nabataean broke her seal

    with a hollow glans like a dog's head.

Sol 6.1