صيرت بدر النظم بعدك غاربا — أبو المعالي الطالوي

You made poetry’s full moon set after you,

when you mounted eloquence at its withers.

And you rose upon its saddle with penetrating thought,

while the radiant stars arrayed themselves for you as constellations—

from every enchantress of glances who, whenever she gazed,

drew keen-edged swords against you from her eyelids;

from the gazelles of Wajra, or the wild does of Rama,

who made your preserve their haunt, as herds and cherished wards.

A lithe beauty, she wrapped herself in meanings as robes

and arrayed herself in spring’s brocade as flowing tresses.

She soared toward Gemini and plundered the jewels

of that celestial strand, then clasped them across her breast.

She walked, outdoing the supple bough in grace—

a gazelle in her glance, the sun in her brow.

How lovely she is—an Arabic ode! Had she vied

with Sahban, he would have departed dragging speechlessness behind him.

Or had her diction challenged Quss in eloquence,

never would he have stood at Ukaz to deliver an oration.

Or had Ghaylan glimpsed the lightning of her smile, he would not

have lingered at Mayya’s deserted ruins, lamenting.

Within her, delicacy of wording and meaning meet together,

harmonized like wine with pure water.

If one day, in the beauty of her composition, she vied with

the blazing stars at rising and setting,

it would be through the glory she contains in praising one

who outshone kings in squadrons and in virtues—

Murad, the Shadow of God, before whom

the heads of kings have bowed in East and West;

a king whose lance-point and fingertips

vie in pouring forth blood and streaming bounty;

lord of might across both horizons, and of such resolve

that before it the leader of the Persians turned and fled.

May the angels never cease to guard his realm,

and may his fortune ever rise, never set,

so long as the robes of verse make his reed pen ring

and clothe it in the brocade of ornate rhetoric like headbands.