In Praise, and a Complaint of the Cold

You who by wise counsel guide the will of kings, you who, in truth, are the model for all scholars, chief of the free and the pride of faith and nation, from your hand every craving finds its plenty. At the palace of your worth, Saturn and Venus stand as slaves and servants at your gate. The moon on your threshold is like a slender eyebrow; Mercury attends your presence as a boon companion. Your noble being in this desolate world is like meaning hidden in the heart of a name. Folded within your smallest subtle point lies the accumulated wealth of ages of sages. The narrow eyed beauties of Khallukh and Yaghma wear the ring of servitude in the ear of your magic pen. Before the riddles of your mind, even the eye of the sun stands baffled and unsolved. The heavens would halt their turning if your command reached them, apart from us. Exalted lord, whose threshold the assembly of the heavens itself calls a sky above the sky: The army of winter has arrived and undone the sun's warmth and the strength of its heat. It has locked the water beneath planks of ice, and stripped the branches bare of their garments. The warm spring of the sky that measures the heavens has grown as feeble as my darling's languid eyes. Faint and weak, from behind the veil of cloud, it only gestures with a coy wink. The sky, so fair of face, tucks a brazier of ether under its skirt to keep warm. You would say that earth and sky have folded shut, bubble upon bubble, one against the other. The flame of fire is like refined gold, while our page has turned to raw, pale silver. In the domain of the garden the growing power has been dismissed from the work of sprouting. From the thunderbolts' crashing, the snow lays cotton wool in the ears of the deaf, solid rocks. The stream of the Milky Way, frozen over, has become a dark tangle of the stars' hair. They have all become sun worshippers, the fools of the age and the wise alike. No one has any desire left for shade, even if that shade were cast by the phoenix. From cold the body is frozen like indigo and madder dye, congealed in the sweat of its own blood. One who has a fur coat, like an egg in its shell, draws it tight around himself, and yet, whoever, like that other man, is naked, is now seized by fits, now falls into a faint. And the one wrapped in quilt and night sheet is not, by night, as snug as a date's pit in its fruit. You will soon see him like a walnut, his skin gone dry and hard as leather from the cold. In this bitter, killing frost my own clothing is senseless and empty, like your promises. Since no one stuffs the wretched cold's mouth with anything but fur, be kind and generous. Clothe our back, for you have always been the warmth and support at our back. Though there is a flaw in a rhyme or two, which was not the practice of the ancients, forgive it, for in such a tight strait there is no telling apart my aim from yours.