English
Elegy for Izz al-Din Ahmad ibn Yusuf
A grief struck my heart, and my soul's peace was gone;
and whoever came into this world left it, alas, in sorrow.
The eye of the spring has good reason to weep aloud
for the garden, now that its tall cypress is gone.
The lovely tree had grown to its full height,
then suddenly, to the gardener's grief, it vanished from sight.
The world mourned him as it mourned the blood of Siavash;
it shed the blood of Siavashes, and its eyes ran with tears.
The smoke of my heart rose from the window; no pot's smoke
ever rose like this, all the way to the sky.
As long as fire exists, no one's harvest has burned like this;
beware the fire whose smoke reached the heavens.
No one's door and wall have known such a downpour of disaster;
on our roof the drainpipe ran with tears of blood.
Bitter is the drink of separation's grief, and more bitter still
for a cypress-tall youth who left, longing, before his time.
So much blood, in truth, flowed from the wound
that it drained from the eyes of his loving mother and father.
My bleeding heart turned black like the poppy,
now that the fresh young cypress has left the garden.
We took wounds that drew neither blood nor a cry;
ah, what a sting was this, that went straight to the bone.
The sober do not reproach the grief-stricken,
for his memory will not leave my heart, and the beloved is gone.
The light and lamp of his people passed from before our eyes
the way a flashing bolt of lightning passes, and so he went.
But there is no cure for the deadly wind of death's wrath;
many a leaf like this has scattered on the autumn wind.
We are all a caravan bound for the next world, out of the land of life;
he was a man who set out ahead of the caravan.
May the fortune of this noble house and its brothers
last forever, though one of the household is gone.
O pure soul, may your resting place in the earth be blessed;
you were not the only one on whom time's cruelty fell.
The wise know for certain that the bird of the soul
found its freedom the moment it left this nest.
Beware that dark night and that dawn
when no word came from you, and only our wailing rose.
This was no wound that a salve could heal;
what use is medicine for the heart once the soul is gone?
Even so, I have not fully told the story of grieving for you;
this is but one in a hundred that my grieving heart has spoken.
Saadi always bears the burden of parting from him,
but this time the reins of patience slipped from his hands.
It was the decree of God, a conjunction from the heavens,
that came upon the hand and sword of the mighty king.
May his life be long, for over the killing of the innocent
he once cried regret, but by then the arrow had left the bow.