1. If only I knew: will the dwellings tell me

    with certainty about their people, where they went?

  2. They stirred sorrow; from them today you have

    nothing but anguish and remembrance.

  3. One who is not alive cannot answer the living.

    Blindness—news lies with someone other than him.

  4. A tribe's abode, its days of habitation long past;

    its dwellers gone, it fell desolate, and they perished.

  5. They encountered a scourge among time's calamities,

    after years of traveling through uplands and lowlands.

  6. Remembering them, I feel as though I were suffused

    with potent highland wine from Palestine,

  7. aged in jars, from Bayt Ra's,

    for years, never bought by merchants.

  8. It is tawny wine that leaves a man dim-sighted,

    with redness in the whites of his eyes.

  9. War barred the way to Salma; my heart

    is on loan to her—if only she would reward it.

  10. She went far away; a man withdrew with her from her love—

    a rough-living camel-herd, ever roaming.

  11. Owner of camels, when he loathes a people's land,

    his cares see him off, a loud-bawling man.

  12. A wild creature of the wilderness; there she bore him—

    his mother; its wild-cattle herds never leave.

  13. Not one to pine for a friend when

    the empty, glimmering wastes conceal his tent.

  14. My heart is attached to that man's wife; yet how

    can a skittish oryx cow give the archer his chance?

  15. A meadow whose soil spring has enriched

    with floods, and which blossoms have adorned.

  16. People are powerless to reach its protected ground,

    and rains have resounded across its meadow.

  17. Dark-green, it clothes itself in every color,

    as adornment whenever the daylight rises.

  18. Indeed, I ride out at dawn on a sleek, powerful steed,

    whom the training-course has pared lean after his slimming.

  19. Broad between the short ribs, never once was he led

    for a farrier to labor at throwing him down.

  20. Thick of backbone, his shoulders rise high;

    his curved ribs enclose a spacious barrel.

  21. He looks broad-barreled as he turns away;

    his running has force and a swift, cutting rush.

  22. His build is compact; he almost, whenever

    a crier's voice alarms him, takes flight.

  23. When he quivers, coming forward, a lofty neck adorns him,

    like a palm trunk, the cheek-strap out of reach.

  24. A thrusting hind leg carries him upon

    a powerful foreleg, from which no stumble is feared.

  25. And hoof-frogs, enclosed by solid hooves,

    with no splaying visible in their pasterns,

  26. like boulders in a streambed, overlaid

    by water with green and dusky brown.

  27. The flesh was pared from their lower limbs, drawn high,

    then rose, and the tendons grew taut.

  28. His breast rises above the heart's pulsing place,

    with breast-ribs and veils between them.

  29. And ribs that seem, when he turns away,

    to show a wooden brace in each rib.

  30. The backbone rises, running even as far as where

    horsemen sit upon his vertebrae.

  31. Lean and narrow-bellied, like a smooth rope,

    bare-limbed, firmly wound and tightly twisted.

  32. We hunted with him; word came: 'In a dark-green tract,

    divided in two, are a wild-ass herd and bustards.'

  33. And there were the tawny Akhdari wild asses, browsing

    patches with green growth for them in between.

  34. As though forage without drinking had been enough, until

    their flesh grew plump, while their bellies stayed small.

  35. We mounted our boy upon a noble steed,

    and pointed; he said, 'Where did they point?'

  36. Then they emerged, coming toward us, and we said,

    'Is this calm in them, or alarm?'

  37. The wild beasts took fright, then turned away when

    their eyes showed them truly what he was.

  38. Fleeing, they could see nothing; yet

    flight does not save one from death.

  39. Then the darting ones among them were overtaken

    by a swimming steed, still surging after his first burst.

  40. With his two fine ears erect, he shakes off

    bursts of panting through a snorting nostril.

  41. They scattered, leaving wounded grazers behind,

    and dust cleared from their backs.

  42. He gapes, his jaws like the two bows

    of a pack-saddle, their timber laid bare,

  43. exposing a tongue like the body of a yellow

    monitor lizard, with dew spat upon it by 'arar blossoms.

  44. People say that the best of Quraysh

    in lineage, when the nobles' pedigrees are traced,

  45. are between Harb and Amir ibn Kurayz;

    those are the noble, the excellent.

  46. Nurturing mothers, bearers of noble offspring, bore them,

    and those nurturing mothers are freeborn.

  47. And when the fire of war dwindles,

    they raise their own war-fire and stir it up.

  48. And when spring holds back, they keep alive

    their neighbors and keep safe those they shelter.

  49. They are the men of eminence and worthy deeds,

    and generosity, when reports are put to the test.

  50. They are the defenders when people gather;

    by the noblest, honor and dependents are protected.

  51. They drove reproach away; it lies far from them,

    finding no resting place wherever they dwell.

  52. Praise refuses to ally itself with any people

    but them; it follows wherever they go.

Sol 6.1