شِفَاهُكِ فِي الْهَوَى أَشْهَى لِكَأْسِيوَرَشْفُ رَحِيقِهَا غَايَاتُ نَفْسِي
أَنَا فِي الْعِشْقِ أُسْتَاذٌ كَبِيرٌوَقُبْلَتُنَا هِيَ الْأُولَى بِدَرْسِي!
تَعَالَيْ يَا حَبِيبَةَ قَلْبِ صَبٍّنُبَدِّدْ بِالْوِصَالِ شُجُونَ أَمْسِي
سَأَغْمُرُ خَافِقَيْكِ بِدِفْءِ حُبٍّوَأُسْمِعُكِ الْغَرَامَ بِعَذْبِ هَمْسِي
Your Lips
- In love, your lips are what my cup most craves;
to sip their nectar1 is the most my soul would ask. - In love I am a great professor, and our kiss
is the very first lesson that I teach in class! - Come, darling of an ardent lover's2 heart:
let union scatter all the sorrows of my past. - I'll flood your throbbing heart3 with warmth of love,
and let you hear my passion in a whisper, sweet and low.
Notes
- Raḥīq is a pure, choice wine, the word the Qur'an uses for the sealed wine of Paradise (83:25). In Arabic love poetry the beloved's lips are often likened to wine, so the lips here are at once the cup's desire and the drink. ↩
- Ṣabb is the lover consumed by ardent, yearning passion (ṣabāba); the word is a stock term of the classical love lyric. ↩
- Khāfiqayki is literally 'your two throbbing ones'. Al-khāfiq, 'the throbbing one', is a common name for the heart, and the dual extends the image to the whole breast. The dual al-khāfiqān is also a set phrase for East and West, the two ends of the earth, so the word may hint that his warmth will flood the whole of her. ↩
English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.