أعيذكَ أن يعاصيكَ القصيدُ

I charge you that the poem never prove disobedient, nor that song falter upon your lips.

That stammers never clutter your tongue, nor the precious necklace come unstrung.

I charge you not to wander every valley, while you are a messenger to every listening ear.

So be like the ancient covenant, surging with youth, and render your verse exquisite, glorious elder.

For your life-vein has vowed to sing with love of mankind as long as the pulse beats.

And to a female questioner asking, 'Have you nothing new?' I reply, 'The ancient is the new.'

Yesterday I uncovered the face of a terrifying tomorrow, stripped bare by a runaway rhyme.

Like Zarqa al-Yamama when a piercing vision illuminated her people's destinies.

I was no prophet thereby, yet the prophet of poetry is a rebellious, cunning jinn.

By your life, the heedless nights return if their coming is not met with fear.

They return bearing what they carried and cast away, much like the newborn dawn and its peers.

He who takes no lesson for tomorrow from yesterday—let him be the sharp intellect or the utter fool.

O youths of the Gulf, and many a memory is retold without wearying those who hear it again.

I hurried toward you, driven by my riding-camels, to a meeting twin to your noble endeavor.

Behold these faces radiating gentleness, radiating with the like of which this highland shines.

You leaned over me in care, while around me drifted the dew of love and exquisite tenderness.

Blessed are you, and blessed is what your talents have built, and blessed are your efforts.

Through you and the conscious elite, the barren desert wilderness has been crowned with the fairest oasis.

Out of the bitter salt flats a cool, gentle breeze walked, making the palm tree dance.

Sweet, fresh water flows through the arid land, and in the dry sand a branch flutters.

I stood upon the Gulf as an emerald melts into it, adorning all existence.

Revolving along the shores just as necklaces and collars circle the throat.

Unfettered, hemmed in by no distances, halted by no barriers or dams.

Around its shores extends a spring bubbling with what revives and never perishes.

Oil fields enrich their monitors, their invaders, as long as the bank account swells.

So I said—and in nomadism is that which adorns nomads, and in civilization is that which builds—

Abu Dhabi, by what she took and gave, is a bride whose dowry is blazing fire.

Visions of thirsty wanderers flashed before me, enveloped by scorching lowlands and high plateaus.

Chieftains through whose suffering ages flourished, noble and enduring.

They fell upon its scorching heat in prostration, bowing and prostrating all around it.

They crawled over it with graves awaiting them, and melted beneath it with graves awaiting them.

O youths of the Gulf, and the paths of glory never fail, populated by successive delegations.

Proud heads loom over them, noble necks turning this way and that.

Generation after generation springs from them; the graves of the steadfast are their very cradles.

Eternal upon its high mounds, endless eternity spreads its wing over them.

I call upon you while the earth trembles, the promise has died, and the threat surges.

The wide world was shaken, and the slumbering malice of the wakeful and sleeping settled down.

Our land became a spinning sphere bounding among factions, leaning or swaying.

Its arena of games became as narrow as the shortest mapped boundaries.

Flashes of lightning snatch it away in sequence, and uniform thunders terrify it.

The sheer speed of its constructed foundations threatens to scatter ice across the burning sands.

Beware, sons of the Gulf, for there is a beast with iron fangs, predatory and spiteful.

Cunning in its measure within a hidden snare, catching worlds among its catches.

It flatters you with overtures while sending invading armadas to prowl your coasts.

O youths of the Gulf, there is no choice, despite what the propagandists claim, and no escape.

And there is neither anyone who bows to the imperialists nor anyone who defends.

And our ruin has no hoped-for aspiration save that the scattered flock be gathered.

What a nation divided into twenty-three parts, asking 'Are there more?'

Prepared for each separate part are drums and guards, and banners rise.

Beside India lies a quarter of humanity by count, while the Indians divide into just two halves.

Charlatans manufacture magic and antidotes out of what the ancestors wrought.

Excuses that charm while they are awake, and phantom visions that entice while they sleep.

The ancestors never surrendered Jerusalem one day, nor did Jews occupy Palestine.

Nor were they led by any foreigner, whenever and however he chose to drive them.

Saladin used to break bread and sleep upon the ground alongside his soldiers.

He would stretch forth a forearm for death, and compliant forearms would follow him.

Forearms inflamed for the outposts, their motto martyrdom and the martyr.

And behold, there is a roaring warship for him, and a towering palace for the indulgent.

The immortals die in every valley, yet immortality remains stubbornly beyond death's reach.

O youths of the Gulf, there is no betrayal of the benefactors' warnings, nor any ingratitude.

For you and me there is blood here and there, a startled veil, and a banished brother.

Tomorrow we are promised arenas where the distant will be folded into the near.

Except that by the light of pure blood, hideous black visions present themselves to us.

Visions of spectators watching tragedies as though they were witnesses at a wedding.

The wounds of their kin ooze, while pus offends pampered nostrils.

O youths of the Gulf, every foul harvest shall eventually be rejected by the reaper.

After today an extended shadow shall flutter over the glowing embers of midday heat.

A wretched echo of sorrowful tunes shall be replaced by the happy strings of longing.

Though the walls of the nights have closed in, a pillar of dawn shall surely be split open.

If effeminacy increases among its sons, the mother of woe and calamity is ever fertile.

Out of the core of despair shall rise a generation of willful strength, mighty and defiant.

Trading what is for what is hoped, and bending what is desired toward what it wills.