Verse 6: Perhaps Addressed to Mirza Habibollah Sadr

Chief of the world, soul of all souls, sky of excellence, you for whom the heavens gladly play the servant. The time has come for your fine nature to mother the children of learning, raising them up in the world. It would be no surprise if your miracle-working spirit laid claim to prophethood in the realm of faith. The scroll of the nine heavens hoped, by fate, that your original thought would serve as its ledger. Out of longing to scatter open your book of perfection, the sun pours gold into the goblet of the sky. In the surging sea where the waves of your thought rage, only the mountain of your steadiness serves as anchor. Where is a line as straight as your fine character, to serve as the axis for the heaven of your thought? When the angels recite the sermon of your glory, the ninth heaven becomes a pulpit for your preacher. In its clumsy way, the new moon, seeking honor, takes a poet's whim to weigh out praise of you. If a single ray of your beauty's reflection fell on it, the moon would grow plump and the sun would waste thin. The wheel of heaven has become all eyes now, since the desert sand, by the light of your fine mind, turns into a star. The ornament of your imagination's bride, that beauty, becomes a jewel on the hand and foot of faith's fair witness. Your nature's ascent, on the peak of holiness's sky, rises above the arch of the ninth heaven. A mine is but a pebble and the sea but a drop where your generous spirit spreads its bounty. Speech is tongue-tied and breath falls silent from shame where your nature takes up the art of eloquence. When your pen sets words to march in composition, it makes the partridge's cup bleed its heart's blood. If the veil should slip from the flame of your nature, the fire of clay's craving would turn to ash. The sun in the sky is called a faint speck of light in any land where your fine spirit shines as a star. For the fragrance of your intimate gathering, in honor, the sun turns to ambergris and the sky to a censer. My king, out of the fear that, through your boundless grace, this servant might rise above the moon and Jupiter, with a hundred tricks the sky has flung me far from you; may your kindness sit in judgment over this injustice. With my eyes far from you and my body cut off from you, my lashes turn to spears and my hair to daggers. The torment of separation has nearly made my heart weary of life and stripped of all existence. Despair is the true affliction, or else why fear death? My good fortune is that it guides me to oblivion. Since the demon of parting led my mind off its path, the one whose glance once met an angel's is gone. The mirror of my hope has darkened from separation; where is the polish of union to make it shine again? Before I tasted the joy of union, the wheel cast me into parting, for it cannot bear my standing to rise above its own. My being a Muslim has become a curse upon me; it is hard, even in Europe no one suffers such unbelief. At least, do not allow, in spite of the heavens, that this broken one turn to dust and then to ash. Show some grace, so that perhaps he escapes this whirlpool and lives happily in your service, playing the servant. So long as the bent heavens pass by your door, so long as the sun plays the beauty and the heart-stealer, may the fair witness of your fortune stay forever young and glad, and may your enemy's back be bent like the arching sky.