In Description of the Beloved (A Riddle)

You are like a fortress of brass with your rules and codes; even imagination fails to force you open. A strange beloved, an odd sort of lover: silent within, yet speaking without. Sometimes you hang your head like a narcissus; sometimes your mouth, like a flower, is stuffed with gold. You pressed your lips shut like a bud because your heart is bound to gold and silver. You have ten tongues like a lily, yet all your secrets stay safe with you. Your form shows in all six directions, an open thing and yet a hidden vault. You never hand your secret to the frivolous, even when your tongue is in others' hands. Like a harp with a hollow belly, your tongue only speaks under the touch of fingertips. You speak softly yet you are stubborn; you give nothing until you have first taken. You never return what is entrusted to you until, from the start, they take charge of you. Until they rub and press your tongue, they will not share their secret with you. Whoever forms a bond with you first ties your tongue for their own sake. I told you: you are bound to gold and silver, once I saw you were a slave to your belly. You swallow everything down at my word; you have given your head over to your appetite. Because of you the scribe keeps his ledger; the treasurer keeps his account upon your head. You were smooth at first, and in the end a line of writing appeared around your lips. Like a shell shut over its inner treasure, your seal is on your lip and your tongue on your head. You have four feet, yet you go nowhere; they nail you to four stakes and you never sigh. Your belly is opened like a woman with child, standing on your feet as if to give birth. You have taken blows without quarrel or war; your four walls are a mint for coining money. Though you have no fear of the pain of poverty, you are battered like this because of silver too. Fortunate is the one in a good state whose treasury has your form. You have bound the old Zal in chains, because his body turned out to be invincible. Whatever you say to friend and kin, you say it all in riddles and hidden tongue. Few can grasp your language, even one who knows a great many sciences. May every grasping long hand be cut short of you; may the mind behind your thought be tenfold sound.