Sol 5.6

  1. The wonders of time are manifold;

    no reckoning can encompass them.

  2. Among them is taking on passion

    after youth’s first bloom.

  3. In him the whole condition changes

    and comes back utterly reversed.

  4. While passion itself is torment—

    behold him there, amid the torment.

  5. As though he were a criminal

    being led away to punishment,

  6. driven onward with a staff,

    knocking at the wrong door.

  7. His face is lost in error,

    his gray hair steeped in dye;

  8. his plaint is like a croak—

    yet not the raven’s croak.

  9. His state is that of a rooster,

    plucked bare and flailing in panic;

  10. or that of a man afloat in a river,

    stripped of his clothes,

  11. tossed by the waves until

    you would think him in the clouds.

  12. Ever since his state turned upside down

    and all his affairs fell to ruin,

  13. union with his beloved became impossible—

    like a man gazing at a mirage.

  14. For his skin is steeped in burial spices,

    and his mind is slipping away;

  15. his bones are all a-tremble,

    and he walks doubled over;

  16. his face has shriveled,

    wrinkled and inflamed;

  17. hunchbacked, his time has come

    to tread upon the coffin boards.

  18. His frame is crooked,

    his nose down in the dust.

  19. He fixes his mouth on fatḥ—wide open—

    to keep that drool raised in rafʿ.

  20. Not a tooth remains in his mouth

    to fend off the swarm of flies;

  21. he dozes, and we shoo them from him,

    from the sockets where his canines grew.

  22. What a gulf—if only he knew—

    between true youth and playing the youth!

Sol 5.6