سلي بعدك الواشين هل ذاع لي سر — Mostafa Saadeq Al Rafe

Ask, after you are gone, the tale-bearers: has any secret of mine spread?

Though estrangement, with its torment, has worn me away.

Yet I concealed from my own breast what was within it,

while in my liver lies what even the breast does not know.

I kept faith with you—not because I expect from love

fidelity, but because treachery is not in my nature.

When your eyes slept, slumber shunned me,

and passing thoughts and reflection spent the night confiding in me.

O you who slay me unjustly, mine are patience and resignation,

though patience brings my heart no sweetness.

If my sin is that I am in love with you,

then from you to yourself comes the pardon—if pardon could intercede.

You may forbid me anything except loving you and delighting in you;

with your glance, you wield command and prohibition over our very hearts.

I have tasted both the sweetness of time and its bitterness;

neither sweetness made me forget your love, nor bitterness.

Ah, may God have mercy on the nights that have passed—

nights when we were together and time was radiant through us.

Between us were the doves of flashing glances,

going at evening and morning, while our hearts were their nest.

Ah, many a night you shone beneath its wing,

and the people of the encampment never doubted that the full moon had risen.

She said, “Who will save me from you? You have become faithless.”

I said, “God forbid that a freeborn soul should betray.”

She said, “Then why complain of love to the dawn?”

I said, “Does a lover’s night ever have a dawn?”

She said, “You have forgotten our pledge.” I said, “Have I any accuser

but my passion for you, on the day the Resurrection gathers us?”

Then she rose in haughty pride, saying, “You have killed him,”

as though she neither knew nor had any knowledge of it.

A man like me is the world’s true gallant: when they bear him

to the grave, the grave folds his noble deeds away.