In the Manner of the Ghazal

I woke bewitched by a slender, graceful eye, and I cannot hold back from it, no matter how I try to keep restraint. To hide love is a heresy in the religion of the heart; I love, even if the watchman rages and rebukes me. The way of one whose heart has been stolen is to endure; whoever cries out in complaint at cruelty has himself been cruel. Let her strike me with the arrows of a deadly glance; whoever bends the bow of those eyebrows makes me his target. A hunter of hearts, set upon the seed of her beauty spot: a snare that catches even the abstaining, austere ascetic. No wonder the wise man wasted away for someone like this; even Galen would have withered with such longing. How can I reach her image in a moment's sleep, when my eyes have not once closed since my beloved went away? I take stock of my body, thinned to a single strand of her hair, so any blow finds me finer and frailer still. The hard boulders of the rocks softened at my anguish, yet your heart never softened to bend and show me tenderness. So it is; and Sa'di is not the first to love; you are the gentle one, and whoever sees you finds only grace.