لاح وقد فاح بهار النهار — أبو زيد الفازازي

It gleamed—and as it did, the day’s splendor breathed perfume,

a lightning bolt that sent the heart flying when it flared.

The raincloud’s silver melted when

the lightning cast its ore into a crucible of fire.

It swept proudly past, strutting, as a hand brandished

for one resolute in purpose, a sword keen of edge.

It drenched the meadow, and its boughs

broke into radiant smiles from the smiling mouths of blossoms.

Thus dew lent splendor to its hair-parting—

a crown—and upon its wrist, a bracelet fashioned of dew.

It recalled to me the old covenant, which I never forget,

though the companions are distant and the meeting-place remote.

And the bewilderment of my state at losing them is

fitful sleep and floods of tears.

I repaid the borrowed joy I had in their company,

for the most binding duty is to return a loan.

Time abides in no single condition:

now it rises, and now declines.

What is loved in it heralds what is hated,

and the bane of wine is the hangover left behind.

O lightning, exchange with me stories of them:

give me your full-length telling, and take whatever brevity you will.

Perhaps you may console me for a joy

that, through losing them, has fallen captive.

You have renewed for me a familiar, oft-quoted proverb:

the aged she-camel yearns at her calf’s lowing.

So do not bid me be patient after them:

I will not heed you—no, I have no endurance.

Tlemcen and all its people would lie desolate,

if choice in all creation were mine.

A land—in leaving her I cast every excuse aside,

many times as often as, within her, I cast restraint aside.

I swear by the Sacred House and its coverings,

by Zamzam, the Corner, and the place of refuge;

and by the chosen pilgrims who wore thin, on their pilgrimage,

white Mahri camels and noble, purebred foals;

and by the sacrificial camels, tethered like lines of script,

arrayed in rows upon sheets of parchment,

having endured the ten-day thirst interval and crossed the wastes,

until its barren and ten-month-pregnant she-camels became alike;

in their thirst they do without the watering-place,

a looming bank of dust their draught against fevered thirst—

an oath that proves itself

by the soundness of its bond and the nobility of its source:

my soul has never found repose in anyone but them;

can brass delight the eye after pure gold?

Ah, may God soothe my heart through them,

for after them it has no rest.

I console my soul with time’s long reach,

though a promised date has passed and the waiting has grown long.

How far from me—when separation is exile—

are those people and those homes!