البدر .. والشجن

The Full Moon… and Heartache¹

1. O full moon, I am a stranger: will you be my comrade on the way?
2. I love you just the way you are, and bring no grievance, no dismay.
3. Be as I would have you be: come over me as inspiration and as taste²;
4. be a gleam before my eyes, and for my dreams, a road.
5. In your hallowed presence³, moon, the heart can find no rest; it throbs away.
6. Keep my heart company, until it can forget the one it loved.
7. Each time I say, ‘I shall forget,’ the memory renews my longing⁴;
8. each time some solace comes in sight, passion kindles up a blaze;
9. each time the darkness spreads, my eye can catch a glinting ray.
10. So when, O moon, will that same gleam become for me the break of day?
11. Are the ardours of my love like riddles, dark and hard to read?
12. Is the sunrise in my soul mere visions, conjured to mislead?
13. Have the flowers of love within me now been set alight?
14. Has the talk of love become mere mumbling in my ears?
15. Have my chaste stories turned into a sin?
16. Is it pitch-black all around me, or is it my eyes that are dim?
17. Answer, O moon, for what has struck me has left my reason dumb.
18. It is the riddle of my life, and I don’t know its talisman⁵;
19. it is my heart’s own sickness: for my sickness, be the balm.
20. Pour down your radiance, moon; pollinate⁶ my lovesick blooms.
21. In the East and in the West, I am a stranger in my every stride,
22. lost upon my own lost road, where only empty wastelands lie.
23. Wherever I may go, the smiles of my life turn from me and pass me by;
24. the sun slips from my eyes, and I am left in my disarray.
25. And if the faintest glimmer ever flickers up before my eyes,
26. despair lets fall a curtain, grim and scowling in its guise,
27. and all my glances turn, and sink in darkness black as night.
28. A world of darkness lies around me, and it snuffs out all my smiles;
29. there my lips have been denied the sweetness of their sips⁷.
30. So when, O moon, will you appear, proclaiming that my life begins?
31. For all my patience, my hot tears have rained down, drop by drop,
32. and in my heart my buried sighs go howling on, and never stop.
33. My cry has lost its way, and wanders, grieving, in the valley of bitter woe.
34. Night has let its canopy fall, and calm has crept away from me.
35. The waves are roaring round me, and the captain of the ship is lost
36. in an ocean of illusion’s mirage, which breathed its spell in me.
37. What charmed me there was the shimmer of the dream, the phantoms⁸ hovering below.
38. If only I knew when the dream might yet come true, and where!
39. My heart is straitened, O my mirage⁹: when will you wipe away its care?
40. I have not despaired; but where will the ship drop anchor?

English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.