Sol 6.1

  1. When did the dwellings at al-Wahid become

    ruins like the borders of striped cloaks?

  2. In the nights when the cord of union with you was new—

    yet the nights leave nothing new intact.

  3. Was it real, or did your phantom visit disheveled men

    and worn-out camels bent beneath their hobbles?

  4. But for the distance of our quest for you

    and the desert's terrors, I would have said, "Return!"

  5. Al-Hajjaj enjoyed well-being and victory,

    in spite of the hypocrite and the envious man.

  6. He called to the people of Iraq as Hud had called,

    for they had strayed as Hud's people strayed.

  7. The rumor-mongers, drunk as they were, seemed like

    Christians frolicking on a feast-day morning.

  8. And they thought to find relief in battle,

    though threats would strike them senseless.

  9. So they came, haltering a male ostrich of the desert,

    to al-Hajjaj amid the lions' thickets.

  10. You met them while their horses were fat,

    with horses gaunt about the eyes and cheeks.

  11. You set up for them at Maskan a market of death,

    and another on the day of Zawiyat al-Junud.

  12. You see the hypocrite's soul within his entrails,

    confronting every deep, slanting wound.

  13. The swords cut them down, as

    a blaze of fire rises through thickets of cut stalks.

  14. And their grim day, when they behold it,

    bears iron's rust upon its tunic.

  15. And al-Hajjaj—so come for his bounty—

    is neither tight-elbowed nor miserly.

  16. Ah, we complain to you of a time of drought,

    and of drinking water in the season of frost,

  17. and the reproaches of our dependents, hungry as they are,

    over the milk of the ever-yielding, bountiful she-camel:

  18. a time that leaves young women blackened,

    though their eye sockets had not been black before.

Sol 6.1