English
In Praise of the Prophet and the Night Journey
The sun of the sky doesn't suit you, my beloved, why would you pair yourself, like the moon, with ones lesser than you?
I watch you from afar, for like the sun the radiance of your face dazzles my eyes.
Your love is enough for my heart from you; yes, people content themselves with the sun's light instead of the sun itself.
My heart swelled with longing for your arrow until the shaft of your coquetry sank in up to its feathers.
Don't stain your hands and your skirt with my blood; my half a life isn't worthy of the wound you give.
The angels would swarm to your head like bees, if you parted your sugar lips in a smile.
Now that the field of beauty is yours without dispute, just step out and show yourself, my silver-breasted idol.
How could another heart be lit by the light of your love? Its torn chest has neither window nor door for it.
When your love fills my heart, what use is my soul? Two kings cannot fit in one country.
I have no need of the sky's sun, for in my heart your sorrow is the sky, you are the sun, and my scars are the stars.
You broke my heart and blood pours from my eyes; strange that the glass shattered yet the wine still drips from the cup.
Why keep my heart chained in grief? Set it free. What harm if your curls have one knot fewer?
My heart brims with blood like a bud; if there's no gentle breeze of kindness, then send a life-giving wound.
Instead of one knot, a hundred knots have fallen in it; no wonder, if I don't know my heart's true worth.
I, who know no one but the tip of your curls, how long will you turn away from me like an enemy?
I don't know what fate this is, that you always raise a toast with my blood to please my enemies' hearts.
As if your cruelty were not enough, time too has now buckled its belt to help the heavens torment me.
To console me, they hold me like a child, now your cruelty, now the tyranny of the sky in their arms.
Lost to myself, they hold me by both hands: grief on one side and sorrow on the other.
I am so weary of the state of this ruined world, longing to escape from this narrow place of fear and danger.
Like a speck of dust I take my place each moment in the sun's beam, hoping to cast myself out through the window of the sun.
Surely I would have left this world by now, had the hope of circling the Prophet's shrine not held me back.
Time throws me down only so that the kindness of the king who cherishes his friends may lift me from the dust.
Paradise itself would come running to my door, if I went to the door of that lord and source of joy.
The one God of the world, king of the realm of faith, the heaven of the world of souls, the leader of jinn and men;
The king upon the throne of prophethood, Muhammad the Arab, the dust of whose threshold is collyrium for the eyes of the heavens.
Before his all-embracing grace, what is devotion, what is sin? In friendship with the dogs at his door, what is good, what is evil?
Recalling the sweetness of his grace, whoever swallows poison tastes the flavor of sugar by the dust of his feet.
Whoever is habituated to the antidote of his love faces no danger at all from the poison of sin.
If it were not for the sun's longing to circle his door, it would be a wonder for it ever to lift its head from the east.
When you raise the banner of intercession on Judgment Day,
you shade the people's heads from the burning sun.
What a wonder, that anyone finds shade then, when from the heat
even the sun itself, desperate, creeps into your shadow.
It would be in vain that hell was ever created,
if you alone interceded for everyone in the world.
You are eager to intercede, and I am lost in wonder
at your noble nature, granting freedom on Judgment Day.
May the remorse that weighs on sinners
never come to torment the helpless ascetic too.
You will not withhold your kindness, and I fear that out of your generosity
the sinner grows even bolder in his sin.
How could anyone climb to heaven with the banner of knowledge
when your love is not their guide and leader?
Your enemy stays a wretch, dark as ignorance in his black cloak,
even supposing he bathed in the sun's bright spring.
If the breeze of your kindness blew through the garden, it could be
that people would gather fruit even from the cypress and the willow.
By the great equator of your justice, with utmost truth,
the celestial belt itself is made of grace and skill.
The heavens' own equator, so crooked and at odds,
stands before yours like a belt with its waist broken.
No decree of fate runs without the sign of your wisdom,
and to oppose your power lies beyond the limits of destiny.
The least of your followers equals a hundred like Moses son of Amram;
the humblest slave of your court outweighs a thousand Alexanders.
The perfect minds owe their gnosis to you,
the rational souls owe their manners and conduct to you.
The lowest step of your rank is the place where, helpless,
Gabriel let his feathers fall along the road.
On the night your lightning of revelation struck the seven heavens,
if the sky did not burn, why did it turn the color of ash?
On the night you departed, leaving its hand stained crimson,
the sky still strikes its head with grief.
The vast realm of your holiness is a space where
the imagination of reason has no room to pass.
How blessed that journey, how fortunate that road, ennobled
with you as its traveler, God as its goal, ascension as its course.
Rapture was the guide, the seven heavens the caravan litter;
the trusted spirit Gabriel ran on foot, while Buraq served as the mount.
What a Buraq, racing like the wind in full gallop;
what a steed, swifter on the road than lightning.
The sky was a ball before its tail, caught in the curve of the polo stick;
the earth beneath its hoof was dust scattered by a storm.
So swift in its turning that wherever it dashed,
it arrived before the line of sight could even reach.
The sun, resembling its brow, rose high in fortune;
the moon, akin to its horseshoe, climbed high among the stars.
Beneath your thigh ran that wind-footed flash of lightning,
Buraq by name, but truly lightning in speed and motion.
The sky leapt out with a broken head beneath its hoof,
and that is why twilight's hem is wet with blood.
So light-footed it takes no harm, not even a speck,
as it shows itself to the eye like the light of vision itself.
At the moment of your ascent on the Night Journey, O king of both worlds,
it raced through the heavens like lightning, in such haste.
Before even one hoof had touched the sky,
the print of its horseshoe was left behind as the crescent moon.
By night it had risen around the heavens, and still
the sun and the moon run after it, breathless in pursuit.
His swiftness on the Night of Ascension is proof enough: he returned before the door knocker had stopped trembling.
However fast he traveled, even that was left behind when he set foot in triumph upon the placeless realm.
Buraq stayed back, and Gabriel's feathers fell away at the spot where his sandaled feet stepped on.
The talk has run long. O my mind, rest a moment; close this book by laying out my own condition.
Great king, you know how the high celestial wheel has girded itself with spite against the wise.
No sapling of merit remains in the garden of this age; and if one supposedly does, it bears neither leaf nor fruit.
Like a nurse, fate lays in the lap of suffering every fruit the mothers of art have borne.
It bites away at all the marks of humanity, so that harm reaches the worthy man from everyone.
To keep watch over such people is like raising a dragon in your own home.
Consider all the cruelties heaven has dealt out of treachery to people of merit, by every child of mankind and jinn.
Especially to me, lost and dazed, who from a flood of injustice can no longer tell my head from my feet.
A thousand thorns have broken in my feet from cruelty, since I plucked a single rose from the garden of art.
I have melted so much that my body has become mere bone, hard as marble, from the turning of this vile sky.
I beg from you a single glance for these dogs, so that I may turn my back on the whole world at once.
I would not buy the favor of earth and sky for half a grain, if your kindness, even half a grain, would aid me.
First I swear by the dust of your feet, which is the crown upon the heads of the lords of jinn and men.
Then by the chain of grace, first and last, I raise my oath higher than the heavens.
By the Maker who by His power laid the four elements to rest beneath the seven heavens.
Then through their union brought forth the offspring that destiny has named the human race.
From Him, the Originator of all things, this motion arose, then by His eternal will, set within measure.
He sent it down the ladder of descent until it found its place and station at the lowest rung.
When He raised it up by the sacred ascension, He drew it to His side and made it a prophet.
By the necessary Being and its claim to universal existence; by the poverty of the contingent, which is even less than nothing.
By that existence which is the very wellspring of being; by that nothingness which in absolute terms is cast out.
By those ranks of being that came forth from divine will, one before, the other after.
By that pure abstraction granted to the intellect, free of any taint of matter and form.
By the luminous intellect and the spiritual soul, by the bodily nature and the mirror-bright form.
By the restlessness and bewilderment of the ninth sphere, and by its blank simplicity, untouched by marks of gain and loss.
By its universal embrace of the world of bodies, beyond whose grasp not even half a speck escapes.
By the eighth sphere and its vast constellations, each one a quarry of a hundred stars.
By those wandering planets whose troubles find no shelter except at your door.
By the poverty of the new moon, which each month, from its destitution, bends its back in humility before the sun.
By the burning of fire, that delicate warm-natured thing that recalls hearts full of sparks.
By the rush of the wind and its restless disorder, forever frantic like the state of helpless lovers.
By the kindness of water and the purity of its essence, which is the source of life for all creation.
By the darkness and lowliness of earth, trampled by the world, never lifting its head.
By the one Being and the two worlds, the three dimensions and the four elements, the five senses, the six directions, and the seven stars.
By the eight gardens of paradise, the nine spheres, and the ten pure intellects, by the rational soul, then by accident and substance.
By the laughter of the streambed and the frown of the wave's crest, by the jug full of the sea and the parched throat of the desert.
By the green of the meadow and the fresh face of the garden, by the bitterness of the colocynth and the honor of the first fruit.
By the laughter of the rose and the weeping of the grieving nightingale, by the scar of the tulip and the violet's pain from the narcissus.
By the sweet smile of the bud and the laughter of the rose, by the eloquence of the lily and the color of the lotus.
By the frown of the sea and the dark fate of the cloud, by the defiance of the shooting star and the brightness of the planet.
By the standing of the wall and the perched roof above, by the cramped heart of the window and the welcome of the open door.
By the cotton-spinning of snow and the glass-making of ice, by the marble-games of hail and the dance of the rain.
By the morning that lifts its veil and the evening that draws one on, by the white face of day and the dark form of night.
By the wheeling of sighs and the world-roaming of tears, by the weeping of nights of separation and the cries of dawn.
By the bond that binds the eye to shedding blood, and the loathing that drives the heart's blood from the liver into tears.
By the eagerness of the beloved's curls to coil, and the laughter that gives the beloved's ruby lips their sweetness.
By that glance, met halfway, the seductive, quarrelsome look of the beloved.
By the teardrop that reaches the lashes and turns back, for fear of the fierce, fight-seeking sweetheart.
By the thread of a life that, from the strain of grief, is held like a rosary, its body tied in a hundred knots.
By your universal grace, O king of the realm of faith, by your mercy that is broad as the light of the sun.
By the lion of the thicket of valor, Ali the friend of God, who guarded your faith with the two-pronged sword Zulfiqar.
By the water of the jewel of purity, whose skirt of honor, through kinship with you, became a sea of eleven gems.
By those two poles of the heaven of leadership, one after another, by the right of the nine who turn in succession.
By the right of the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden, by the origin and the return, from the day of the covenant to the resurrection.
By the truth of all these oaths, great and small, whose offering brought you nothing but a headache.
That if the heavens turn all my body's bones to blood, and if they make my frame a target for shooting stars,
If the worn-out roof of the sky should fall upon my head, and if it should rain meteor-stones down on me,
Every strand of hair in this world, whether straight or bent, cuts into my soul like an arrow or an axe.
My longing for you will not lessen by even half a speck; I will never leave your door for any other place.
If even half a grain of your kindness walks beside me, I could shatter the heads of the moon and the sun with my bare hands.
When your boundless grace takes me under its shelter, what power has any star to steal even a single hair from me?
The tongue of complaint runs long and the nature of desire is meddlesome; by your own kindness, overlook my overreaching.
The length of my words has weakened my plea, yet your grace knows that to keep it hidden is better.
When your kindness cut short the thread of my speech, it gestured: come now, walk the road of your true purpose.
This brilliant ode that sprang from my nature was not from me; it was your grace that became my helper.
Zahir and Anvari were masters who shaped my talent, yet by the blessing of praising you I shattered their slates.
Kamal took the fullest pride in his own gift, claiming he had carried his oath-poem all the way to the heavens.
I had raised my oath-poem up to Kamal's height, then your grace lifted it one whole sky above his.
As long as the heavens carry your saddle-cloth upon their shoulders, fate stands as your servant and destiny as your friend.
Your opponents bend beneath the burden of their sins, while your allies have both fate and destiny as their helpers.