This verse is by Jamil (meter: ṭawīl):
I wish I had the power to forget her! But
every way I go, it's like Layla's there.
It's been said that he would absent himself from [Buthayna] for fear the Evil Eye would turn her against him:
Abu Ahmad [al-Hasan ibn ‘Abd Allah al-‘Askari] learned these verses of his from [Abu Bakr Muhammad] al-Suli, who heard them from both Ahmad ibn Yahya [Tha‘lab] and Ahmad ibn Sa‘id al-Dimashqi, who heard them from al-Zubayr [ibn Bakkar], and he taught them to me (meter: ṭawīl):
She stuck with me long enough for me to dread the Eye.
Two days I stayed away, fearing separation.
I found it hard. It tested my endurance, but not hers.
My darling found my absence no vexation.
A passing East wind buffets the scrubland lodger.
The stirring of that wind just breaks my heart,
that East wind lately come from where my beloved is.
What soul is safe from passion where the beloved used to stay?
And now there dawns awareness of despair inside of me,
with the sensation of your strike against my soul.
Ibrahim "raided" this motif from Dhu 'l-Rumma, who said (meter: ṭawīl):
When wind kicks up from the direction
of Mayy and her people, I am kicked by longing too,
and passion wrings the tears out of my eyes.
What soul is safe from passion where the beloved used to stay?
Al-‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf had a different take on it (meter: ṭawīl):
North winds of heartbreak
are all I see from you, Zalum.
When you break us up through no fault of mine,
they'll lay fault for it with you.
My complaint is old, her rebuff nothing new,
but the shock of it is ever renewed.
From The Register of Poetic Motifs by Abu Hilal al-‘Askari
