This muwashshaha, in which Ibn al-Wakil incorporated hemistichs from the Nuniyya of Ibn Zaydun, is one of the most remarkable poems I have come across:
Our death has been announced.
The crier proclaims our sentence.
Were we unschooled in sorrow, it would do us in
The sea of love drowns
all who try to swim it,
and all who fret and moon
the fire of love scorches.
Many's the young hero
whose sleep it takes away.
It racks and ruins bodies
and makes the days turn
Lightless, when our nights with you were brilliant
Dear confidant, mine own,
stay a while and hear me out.
Beware of giving in to passion,
it'll burn you up.
An ordeal to be avoided!
So hear and spread the word.
The sea of love is bitter.
Heedless, we dove in
And at once the crier announced our annihilation
When hopes turn to fine young things
you are in for disquiet.
My efforts were for
a gorgeous and inhumane lad.
Though his only care was gift-getting,
the favors he got he turned down.
And when he favored me
with caress or near miss,
Morning replaced closeness with separation
I call on all that
ties us together: Unless
you restore our union
and relieve my burning eyes,
this life of isolation
will grind me down.
Let it be the way it was
with my kin and brethren
When the wellspring of our joys was unpolluted
I call on the community
that flees this lovelorn fool,
breaking faith with him
for no wrong done.
It shouldn't be like this.
It is a social ill.
They scant the damage done
by their estrangement
Though ever was estrangement lovers' ruin
O you who crowd my willow!
"By the even and the odd,"
and the Ant and the Criterion,
"and the night when it passeth,"
and al-Rahman and al-Hijr
and the Bee, enlighten me:
Is it lawful in any religion
to kill a man with thirst
For one whose pure love used to fill my cup?
O seeker after rain!
Turn aside at the wadi
of the people of Badr.
Mayhap your thirst
will be quenched by a torrent
if you stand among them and call out:
"Bring me to life,
and bring me kind word
From a distant one whose word alone can revive me"
My days go by
as if they were years.
It used to be the
other way round.
The days flew by like erotic dreams.
I wish they'd never ended,
and a cup of
mixed wine went briskly
between us, and the singers were singing our song
From The Whiff of Scent from a Green Bough of al-Andalus
by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari
