1.
Oh, happy heart! It is announced: my beloved returned.
So, the fortunes of my life and respect returned.
Ask after my misfortune. What does grief do?
Muddies my head.My luck’s regal headdress and my pride’s crown returned.
For a while, the flower was far, my nation’s earth without luster.
The lustrous flower my country’s garden has returned.
The happiness struck like lightning and mourning vanished and each breath became musky.
The one who owns my sword and pen returned.
Chest like a ney, heart like a lute, breath like a yaszy:
Singer, please, slowly.My sorrow-remover has returned.
I lived, yes, day and night, shoved into a tight corner.
The light of the sun and moon, night and day, returned.
Barkeep, spin the wine glass like my landscape spins.
The time to dance, entertain, and get drunk has returned.
My verses are sugar cubes and carpeted fields of my ghazals.
A parrot by nature, the king, my castle’s cornerstone, returned.
A slim flowering tree in the garden has grown so that
The nightingale, the melody holder, returned.The heart had lost the names of various verses and their order.
The garden’s splendor and the order of my epoch returned.
The dust of his hem is beyond anyone’s reach, anyone’s imagining.
Kohl for my pained, tearful eyes has returned.
Happiness has me so confused that I don’t know:
Is it the great Mahmood or last year’s prisoner who has returned?
For Nari, who is mindful, inertia was a hardship without end.
The khan, a man of action, magnitude, and gravity, has returned.
2.
My eyes, don’t point the arrow of your lashes at me again.
Please, there is no fault, no atrocity.
Don’t rain arrows down on me.My heavy illness has its cure in your glass face.
Face me—don’t guide me to Luqman’s house.
My illness is heavy, oh gentle physician,
Don’t trouble yourself over my cure.It’s pointless.
Tell your hair, that barricade, let me come and go.
I’m poor. Don’t wish pain and beatings on me.
Bearing the sad burden of separation from you wearies me.
Don’t leave me far from your face, your hair, disheveled.
Why do you bar me from the garden of your arrival, by God,
Don’t make me crazy, obscure, a vagrant across plains and fields.
Don’t fasten the button of your collar with the honor’s finger.
Faithless girl: don’t deprive me of the sight of the apple garden.
Show your mark and my yearning, a marketplace, will resurge.
Your beauty sells.
Don’t deprive me of crying and yearning.
Put your dark hair away from your cheek for a while.
Don’t keep my portion of my full moon’s shine and beam.
By sharia, I deserve zakat: your beauty.
You own countries—don’t consume my charity.
She told me: Nari, what’s all this talk of sharia and fox hunting?
If I become Hatim, don’t let me go delirious for blessings and bread.
3.
Mina’s envelope, my king, wants the enveloped diamond
The way a sewing machine wants a sharp and dancing needle.
To take the road of the Red Valley, by the warm spring of Abundant Hair,
One requires the hurried mettle of warriors from the Blbas tribe.
The depths of the Red Sea cannot be measured by just anyone.
Only an experienced diver can test that bedrock.
To recognize an ant’s eyes, one needs a magnifying glass.
To find the new moon, one needs heightened senses.
The situation: you have no envelope.
You can’t work enough to get one.
Why: the sword encrusted with gems requires a special sheath.
To be brief, a delicate envelope: a candleholder inside a glass chimney
Needs a candle of camphor, ideally without knots—straight.
4.
A student who spends all his time buying love poems
Weakens his inclination for knowledge and work.
A student puts himself at the mercy of God’s court.
A scholar drowns himself imagining eternity.
A mullah’s descendant, my son, should dedicate his life
To the precision of exegesis and the explanation of sentences.
Prayer beads in a charismatic Sufi’s palm have no light so long
As he places his hope in the thought of wine and the voice of a flute.
If the medicine he drinks has no effect at all,
Then to the patient, it’s poison, even if it tastes of honey.
The homa is hopeless when reduced in consequence to a crow.
The white hawk is tested when reduced in consequence to a turkey.
If you are a pearl, inherit the father’s manners.
Be ready: your father is friend and partner to death.
5.
She sends me, without fault, before the archers of her eyelashes.
I don’t prevent her.
I cry out.
The shout makes a good meal.
I am forced, sentenced to serve at her gate.
Love of her face, a riot, compels me to keep her door.
She may pierce my liver with the arrow of a wink and a smile,
But cure me with kind lips and may her house always be full.
I complain that my heart is sick of her straight hair.
She refers me to the court of her wavy hair.
In the gardens of love, I am famous for my voice.
She sees only a novice nightingale, dumb and mumbling.
In the corner of the school of love, I address matters.
She sees only a teacher’s aide in the youngest child’s class.
Searching for agate, I mine her lips.
She sees only a child in love with the garden’s sour orange.
Let the commander of her eye ask the blood-thirsty eyelashes
Why the army winks at me, each wink an arrow raining down.
My tears water her beautiful garden.
Lines of lightning, moans and cries, rain down.
M is her lips and A is her height.
Ch is her amber hair.
I am bound to her face.
I am hers to command.
My state, my imagination, oh, Nari, has become so chaotic
That people fear my poems as they would a savage.
6.
A wink of her wine-black eye and I am drunk.
A kiss of her satiating lip and I need no starter.
My sighs unhooked her bra of pale, flowering pomegranate,
But she put her hands over those quince, concealing that garden.
Bangs and wisps cloud her face, hiding the luminous visions of the full and crescent moons.
She kills me, her eyelashes clutching at my soul,
And revives me with Christian law, a simple smile.
For shame, she covered her signature hair.
She held that regal brow out of reach.
The water’s edge: my chest.
Her great height: my sycamore.
Why did she slyly conceal the pomegranate and quince?
Don’t blame me, disciple, that I gave my desire to idols.
It was the heart’s crime, making me love a Christian, a vulture.
Address the complaint of your wounded heart, Nari, to Tahir Beg.
Tell him,
“A body like a flower cut my liver down with a single arrow.”The translations are by Alana Marie
Levinson-LaBrosse. In a few instances, I have made minor adjustments to the wording of her translations, but full credit for translating the collection belongs to her.
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