Sol 6.1

  1. The heart yearned for Salma, but you missed the mark.

    Why so much yearning and agitation?

  2. Su'ad said, "I see something strange in gray hair."

    Easy, Su'ad—there is nothing strange about gray hair.

  3. If you see that time has clothed me in its gray hair,

    then what has passed of it has not passed you by.

  4. May rain bless Su'da, despite the gray hair that has come upon us,

    and before that, when the head had not turned gray.

  5. As though her saliva, after sleep, had drunk at evening

    the Pleiades' rain, mixed with vine-water from Halab.

  6. I send forth young, swift, long-necked she-camels, worn down by

    hard-driven trotting and breathless exhaustion from successive stages.

  7. A lean she-camel, far from the camel-driver, when

    the daytime sun filled the sky above clamorous al-Abraq.

  8. Until, when the two had crossed, while night was thick with darkness,

    the valley bend of ban and athab trees in Dhu Ukayhif,

  9. they head for Qays's chief, also the son of its chief,

    and its knight, an unfailing wellspring, never a liar.

  10. Muhammad, his father, and his son have wrought

    for him great deeds of glory and ancestral honor—

  11. the seething of two heated pots, beneath which a fire was kindled

    by a hungry man who passed the evening in a valley rich in firewood.

  12. Indeed, I praised them when I saw that they possessed

    merit above all the other Arabs.

  13. If you do not reward me for it, no one will recompense me.

    And who will give reward if you yourself do not?

Sol 6.1