1. The lash speaks more eloquently than any speaker or speech,

    and than a fool's barking of falsehoods.

  2. Bitter to the taste—its coolest touch is like the fire's heat—

    it brings whoever incurs it most thoroughly to his senses.

  3. It has discovered a medicine that Hippocrates never knew

    for curing every forsaken fool of feeble mind.

  4. Slight of body, yet horses fear its violence,

    more deadly and more imperious than the crocodile in the Nile.

  5. It makes a man dance, though he feels no rapture,

    even were he heavier or more solid than an elephant.

  6. The fool has knowledge and experience of it:

    beneath himself he cast what had once been counted as beans,

  7. and from it he supped peppered broths

    that made him belch the foulest belch from the foulest fare.

  8. He had lampooned him with painful, wounding invective

    that resembled no poetry in composition or detail.

  9. So tell him, should satire ever cross his mind:

    Remember standing there with your trousers undone;

  10. remember circling the marketplaces in disgrace,

    stripped and humbled, abject as one cast out;

  11. and remember the punishment for what you foolishly fabricated

    against the noble lords—the lofty, illustrious leaders—

  12. a company whose sanctity the All-Merciful has exalted

    and singled out for honor from Him, with veneration.

  13. They are truly the choicest of humankind; all others,

    in truth, are but the chaff caught in sieves.

  14. Among them, Ibn Tawba raises high the banner

    of justice, distinguished with a crown.

  15. He sentenced to exemplary punishment whoever failed to honor their due,

    and secured the judgment in this matter with an official record.

  16. The back is his parchment, and the lash seeks it;

    a wretched document, bound by a bond that cannot be undone.

Sol 6.1