Sol 5.6

  1. Before him appeared the horizon of lake and sea,

    and he departed, his throat stained with his heart’s blood.

  2. Yet light slumber kept him from knowing I am enamored

    of a life gone by between al-Rusafa and the Bridge—

  3. a paradise in this world, whose beauty has no peer,

    beneath which rivers burst forth, running.

  4. When people longed for spring, you would find us

    there, in a spring of every loveliness of blossom.

  5. Its gentle breezes would blow and fill our nostrils

    with their breaths, blended with the coolness of the sea.

  6. As though, from my love-enslaved heart, I were striking

    ʿafār tinder at the memory of its tawny dunes,

  7. and of my radiant, bright-faced days among them,

    with no intimate companion but garden and river.

  8. How many vanished mornings and evenings

    in which I reaped good fortune in life’s first flush—

  9. evenings that raw gold clothed in what remained of its earrings;

    ah, how earrings surpass raw gold itself!

Sol 5.6