Sol 5.6

  1. Though al-Hajjaj bears it patiently, there is no affliction

    that could be graver or more painful to one bereaved

  2. than the loss of the chosen one and the one chosen from among his confidants—

    his two intimates—when both departed and bade farewell.

  3. Were the uplands of al-Hima bereft of two such as they,

    all the land around them would become a barren waste.

  4. They were the two wings of a noble man; both departed from him,

    and had they been broken from any other man, he would have collapsed.

  5. The two were—and death is humankind’s ultimate bound—

    a spearhead and a sword, dripping concentrated poison.

  6. No day, save the day of a caliph’s death,

    was ever more harrowing to the people than their two days.

  7. And both men’s bounty, in all that is reckoned,

    was more far-reaching among the people than their two days were.

  8. There is no endurance that does not fall short of your endurance in bearing what

    you suffered on two days—the most hideous in calamity:

  9. for your son and your mother’s son, when there overtook them the—

    Fates, which had already annihilated ʿĀd and Tubbaʿ.

  10. Had those two Fridays followed one upon the other

    upon a mountain, by evening it would have lain a shattered ruin.

  11. Al-Hajjaj would grieve for nothing except what

    concerned the Faith, or the loss of the Imam.

  12. No brother of his, announced dead to him, ever appalled him,

    nor any son among all peoples, as those two together did.

  13. If evening now finds him parted from them by their distant departure,

    then every mortal has swallowed some choking grief.

  14. Would that the two couriers who came one after the other

    with the news they bore had tasted lacerating deadly poison.

Sol 5.6