أتنسى يوم حومل والدخول — Jarir

Do you forget the day at Hawmal and al-Dakhul,

And our standing by the weathered ruins?

And she said, 'You have grown thin and gray since I left.'

By the truth of my gray hair and wasting since you left!

As though wine had been diluted in a glass

With rainwater among shaded, close-set stones.

Your friend says to you, Abu Firas:

May God curse al-Farazdaq—what a friend!

You came out of Iraq, an abomination,

You don a ghoul's garments in the shadows.

And no drink warranting the prescribed penalty escapes you,

Nor any foolish woman whose husband is away.

If he enters Medina, stone him,

And do not bring him near the Messenger's grave.

Al-Farazdaq has surely learned that Taym

Have an unwholesome draught whenever they drink.

O son of Taym, ours are the foremost forebears,

When the road's ascent grew narrow.

And I boast of the great chiefs of Tamim,

And you boast of the vile and the few.

So you will never be able, son of Taym's spurious kinsman,

To jostle kings on slippery ground.

Taym among the sons of Tamim are like

A gelding among virile stallions.

O slave of Taym, the sons of Tamim indeed—

My thickets and my woodland are entwined among them.

And I have hurled at you, from Tamim,

A heavy burden you cannot stand against.

I have finished with the smiths, and Taym was bitten

By a watered-steel blade, unnotched in its blows.

And I said, in sincere counsel to the sons of ʿAdi:

'Guard your clothes from the spray of the slain man's blood.'

Have you faulted horsemen who brought Taym back,

And their galloping in a race against evening?

So Taym's daughters, riding pillion, were brought back

By horsemen of Yarbuʿ, steady in the saddle.

We caught up with ʿUyaynah and Ibn Shamkh,

And the two had passed with them by Haqil.

They saw the sway-backed daughters of Taym

Emerging from troops of tall steeds.

My seas have indeed torn through Taym's root;

So they have drowned where the torrents collide.

You paired the father of the base, your father Taym,

With a hunched-shouldered, fierce assailant—

With Zayd Manat: every bone is crushed

By his mature camels, grown beyond maturity.

He bore down on Taym and crushed Taym's necks,

Heavy of tread, bearing a mighty mace.

You encountered our firmly planted bulwarks,

And side after side that hurls you about.

Taym, when they boasted of Saʿd, were like

The tribe's slave women boasting of laden camels.

You see the Taymi creeping like a long-legged beetle

Toward a Taymi woman, like a stick for ash-baked bread.

When she bares her teeth at him, he says, 'An affliction!

You bare your teeth with neither beauty nor grace!'

Taym's bride mars the saffron,

And walks with a dung beetle's backward shuffle.

Those beholding her say, 'Taym's bride has

An Umm Hubayn lizard's limbs and an elephant's head.'

And even if she were washed with Dujayl's two canals,

She would say, 'I have not had enough washwater.'

Whenever she acts like a camel, she bares her teeth at him,

With a skull steeped in thickened camel-urine salve.