Original content

English translation

Alas, that the remedy for your affliction became the poison of wrath that draws out your soul.

This lamp increased the darkness of that eye when God set the veil of anger in place.

What lordship do we seek from you, when our authority surpasses the heavens?

What honor does the sea gain from a ship— especially a ship that has become filled with dung?

Alas for that blind and dim eye in which a sun appeared as a mere mote.

Of a human who was matchless and peerless, the eye of Iblis saw nothing but clay.

The madman's eye showed him spring as winter; he moved toward the side where his home lay.

How many a fortune that comes from time to time turns away from the path before the unfortunate one.

How many a beloved who comes unrecognized— before the wretched one who knows not how to surrender to love.

This that deceives the eye is our deprivation, and this that turns the heart is the evil decree of fate.

Since a stone idol became your qibla, curse and blindness became your canopy.

How can your stone be a partner to the Truth, when intellect and soul cannot be the confidant of the Truth?

A dead gnat became partner to the huma— how then can the living not be confidant of the King?

Or perhaps the dead one is your carving, while the living gnat is God's carving.

You are lovers of yourselves and your own handiwork; the serpent's head is the way of the serpent's breath.

There is no fortune or blessing in that breath, no ease or pleasure in that head.

That serpent's breath revolves around its head; those two companions are worthy and fitting for each other.

Thus speaks the Sage of Ghazna in the Ilahi-nama, if you listen well:

"Meddle less in the decree of Fate— a donkey's body befits a donkey's ear.

Limbs and bodies became commensurate, attributes became commensurate with souls.

The attribute of every soul has proportion, undoubtedly, with the soul that the Truth has fashioned.

Since He has joined attribute with soul, know their proportion to be like that of eye and face.

Attributes became commensurate in beauty and ugliness, letters became commensurate that the Truth wrote."

Eye and heart are between two fingers, like a pen in the hand of the writer, O Husayn.

The fingers are Grace and Wrath, and in between, the reed-pen of the heart moves with contraction and expansion from these fingers.

O pen, consider, if you would have dignity, who you are between the two fingers.

All your intention and movement is from these fingers; your head is set at the crossroads of four ways.

These letters of your states are from His transcription; your determination and cancellation too are from His determination and cancellation.

There is no path except need and humble entreaty; not every pen is aware of this turning.

This pen knows, but according to its own measure; it reveals its own measure in good and bad.

What they hung upon the hare and the elephant to mix the pre-eternal with stratagems.