English
Elegy for the Martyred Chancellor Rukn al-Din Sa'id
Where is the outcry, the uproar, the wailing? Why are you silent? The master lies in this state, and you keep your wits about you?
Purity was cast out and safety fled like comfort; well-being packed up and left, and still you are silent.
If you truly knew what disaster has struck, even so alive, you would surely boil over within yourselves.
To see what this calamity has written upon our heads, mourn while there is time and strive to weep.
Our dark days may yet turn bright as day, if in this grief you dress in coarse black like the night.
It is a false reckoning if you imagine that after the master you will ever taste one cup of joy.
Neither I am ashamed before myself, nor you before me, when you hear from me the elegy for the world's chancellor.
Wail and wail, for hearts are not full enough of pain; weep and weep, for this catastrophe deserves it.
Shall I speak first of his rank and his noble lineage, or of his learning, piety, abstinence, and worship?
Shall I count his manliness, humanity, excellence, and virtues, or speak of the school, the lectures, and the wisdom he gave?
Shall I first describe the good name he kept all his life, or speak of this very end and his martyrdom?
It is a day of mourning, so people, laugh at me: that at such a wake I recite verse out of habit.
God knows I would not have done justice to a single quality of his, even if I spoke of it for a hundred years.
You who are his enemy, by God, come and speak yourself, so no one says I praised him merely from boldness.
Since he became the key to eternal paradise, what wonder if I call this arrow of death an omen of good fortune?
All this bloody weeping upon my cheeks is the trace of the bloody grin of a single arrow's notch.
How strange that people are weary of themselves and of life; what strange year is this, come round again, so strange a year?
They laid the chancellor of the world level with the dust, yet no stones rain from the sky; how strange the state of things.
If patience finds the field of the heart too narrow, at least there is strange room for tears upon my face.
The grave swallowed the lion, a mighty prey; the dust drank down the sea; how strange a punishment.
From now on it is grief for me, and for everyone like me; how could we know that a cheerful heart after this is a strange impossibility?
If anyone imagines that by some kind of talent he can be happy after this, what a strange delusion that is.
A sun who held the Quran with him, and then from that Quran came an eclipse and a decline; how strange.
See what bravery they showed when they set a notch to a bowstring: how such faintheartedness dared to do this.
The people of the city all gathered at his gate, sitting at the wake, and the day grew very late.
The chancery lay without splendor, all hearts in dread, as if none dared wake the master from his sleep.
No, he rises early at dawn; this long sleep is not his way; I do not know what has happened, alas.
This long sleep is not to his taste, for he used to shorten our long living nights with wakefulness.
What wound is this that came from armies and hordes, when neither the world, nor wealth, nor followers, nor troops availed?
All this pomp and order of our master, was it only this? To this it came: we belong to God.
The master's dignity, throne, and grandeur are all gone; the house is left in darkness and its doors are black.
They should not decree such a moving of house; after a lifetime one should return home better than this.
Chancellor of Islam, where are you, where is your face? In this calamity you are like a reed; where is your comforter?
Enemy and friend watch you from every side; where is your force that crushed the foe, your gentleness that harmed no one?
What befell you, that you left your place so soon? Where is all that heavy, weighty patience of yours?
Where is the awe of even a shadow from the corner of your turban, that could quiet all this tumult of the city?
Sedition woke from your long slumber; oh, alas, where is that wakeful fortune of yours?
You whose face, like a tulip, is stained with the blood of the heart, where is all that glow and freshness of your rosy cheeks?
Where, moment by moment, is that sweet, sugar-scattering word you spoke to me under your breath in kindness and grace?
What are stone and anvil beside our heedless hearts? You beneath the earth, and we passing above it.
Who in the world now has the habit of mounting the pulpit? Whose mind is fit for learning, whose heart for the record?
Since the crown of the pulpit fell to the dust in this mourning, it befits dust alone now to sit atop the pulpit.
Let the seat of the law wear black, for that is fitting; let the pen of legal rulings weep blood, and it is proper.
Who now will hold back tyrants from the weak below? Who will help the helpless after today?
From whom shall pilgrims and petitioners now beg, when this door was the appointed place of their daily bread?
For two or three days the orphan and the widow have wandered lost; alas, I fear it will grow even worse than this.
You left the world with a clean skirt, and until the skirt of Judgment Day the mountain's skirt will stay wet with our heart's blood.
Who has the courage or the strength to bring to their lips that such a master left the world in such a way?
The master should have heard his own praise from me, not that I recite his elegy while the enemy listens.
There should be another whose harvest is burned like mine, to hear the state of my own burned harvest.
Whoever pulls the cotton of heedlessness from the ear of reason, oh how many a lesson he hears without needing it spoken.
You who left none like yourself in the world, and this is confirmed whether man or woman hears it,
After this event, bird and fish, in longing for you, wherever they lend an ear, hear wailing and lament.
In this soul-burning mourning of yours, where is a listener to hear the sound of weeping from wall and door?
Now I lament aloud; tell them to gather round me, whoever wishes to hear the grief and pain of my heart.
Has anyone ever heard so terrible a decree of fate? A world of learning and talent, and an arrow the end of it all.
You who sleep in the earth of the grave, farewell from us; though you were greatly angered, farewell from us.
You who, by the sudden broom of affliction, have swept the joy from our hearts, farewell from us.
You precious, priceless pearl of virtue, pierced by the diamond of cruelty, farewell from us.
You fresh flower who in paradise, from the thorn of the arrowhead, blossomed before your season, farewell from us.
Though you are in the right for the wrong you saw from us, that you hid your beautiful face, farewell from us.
I know that in the moment when you had no care to speak, secretly to everyone you said farewell from us.
Alas, our meeting is postponed to the Day of Judgment; sweet sleep to you, and while you sleep, farewell from us.
He set out on a journey, and piety is his provision for the road; may the survival of his two beloved sons endure forever.
Especially this chancellor, who is the aim of the whole world, in truth is a successor like Solomon to David.
Whoever has a successor like Nizam al-Islam, in both worlds his end is wholly praised.
He whose only hope is a life a hundred times as long: whatever was the essence of the father exists in him.
When you look at his greatness and his features, you may say he is both Sa'id and Mas'ud.
The branch broke, but may your fruit remain; the flower withered, but its fragrance is the goal.
First and last of them, each finer than the other; the tree of the Sa'idids is like fragrant aloewood.
Until this rosebush of fortune bears fruit, everyone's trust is in the generosity of the Worshiped One.
The rampart of Islam is broken, and we are unaware; the pillar of the faith has left its place empty, and we only look on.
Master, chancellor, what suddenly befell you, that both this servant and the free wearied you?
Was the world too narrow for you, so you pitched your tent in paradise, or did the heavens, in their folly, give you to the wind?
You were a free cypress in the garden of the Prophet's law; may the hand wither that uprooted you unjustly.
You whom the wounded of heart remember so much, high and low, woman and man, remember you with heart and soul.
Through you much joy reached the hearts of people; I know God, in His mercy, will make you glad.
You did much good, and I am certain that all that goodness comes to your aid today.
In this moment, whatever thing you need, may all of it be granted you from God Most High.
O God, in this perishing courtyard of time, grant the chancellor of the faith to the other great ones.