غزل شمارهٔ 937

Love for you makes me oblivious to my own kindred, for love of you has rooted up the foundations of well-being;

For Love desires only ruination of one’s affairs, for Love accepts counsel from no calamity.

What place is there for wealth and fair repute and respect and pomp? What is household and safety, what family or children?

When Love’s sword snatches away the lover’s soul, a thousand lay down their sacred lives in thanks therefor.

What, the desire of love for you, and then the fear of ruination? You with purse fastened, and then the love for that sugar lip?

Draw back your head and sit in the corner of safety—the short hand aspires not to the tall cypress.

Go! In all your life you have not caught the scent of Love; this is not Love, this is reason self-satisfied.

What is it to exercise patience and snatch the skirt out of temptation, seated to see what will come down from heaven for a few days?

Love’s fire arrived and consumed all that is beside Him; since all is consumed, sit content and laugh gaily!

Especially the love of that One the like of whom, from Alast till now, has never been so devoted to chastity.

If you say, “I have seen Him,” for God’s sake open another eye and close these twain;

For by this glance, thousands of thousands like me and you in both worlds have been destroyed and blinded for ever.

If to my eye other than that Beauty should come, may my two eyes be gouged out with an axe!

The sight of all heroic men has proved powerless; how should the slothful attain the Beauty and Majesty of the King?

Would that God had rent the veil of being, even as ‘Al¯ı the Lion rent the gates of Khaibar,

That the eye might have seen how for a thousand years, five times a day, the drums are beaten for him on the other side!