Sol 5.6

  1. And a frozen rivulet that you carry in your palm,

    in which the gaze dives after the pearls of reason.

  2. It robes the written lines in light when darkness falls upon them,

    as though a spring of light were bursting from it.

  3. It reveals the book’s script to the eye, just as

    air lets things show through—though its body is stone.

  4. It makes the letters visible through a wound dealt them by a vein

    within it; over them a river has settled, frozen solid.

  5. My eye, when it grew weary, was kohled with its jewel;

    is sight not sharpened by the jewel’s kohl?

  6. It is as though it were the mind of one skilled, with which he unravels

    from among riddles a knotty problem whose solution is hard.

  7. How excellent an aid for an old man whose sight has grown weary,

    and in whose eyes old age has made the writing small.

  8. Through it he sees the forms of the written lines enlarged,

    as in a water-filled bulb the finest down looms large.

Sol 5.6