We have lost you as keenly as one loses youth itself; would that
we could have ransomed you with thousands of our own young men. (1)
Alas, my people, for death and decay—
even the earth, after him, seemed ready to quake. (2)
Alas, my people, for the blows of calamity and destruction,
for a time relentless and violent toward the noble.
If Yazid ibn Mazyad was the man who struck him down,
many a battle-line had he already wrapped within his own.
Upon him be God’s abiding peace, for I see
death swooping upon every man of honor. (3)
He was killed in the year 179 AH.
46 – Yazid ibn Hatim ibn Qabisah ibn al-Muhallab ibn Abi Sufrah al-Azdi,
a Basran commander.
He assumed the governorship of Egypt in 144 AH, remained in office for seven years, and then was appointed to another post.
(1) In Abu Tammam’s al-Hamasah the verse is transmitted as: “Faqadnahu faqdan al-rabiiʿ falaytana * fadaynahu min dahamaʾina bi-aluf” (“We lost him as one loses the spring; would that we could ransom him from our common folk with thousands [of camels]”).
(2) This line is absent from al-Buhturi’s Hamasah; it is cited in Ibn Khallikan’s Wafayat al-ayan.
(3) The line does not appear in al-Hamasah but is recorded in the Wafayat al-ayan.
(*) Principal sources: Khalifa b. Khayyat, Tarikh, pp. 434, 441; Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi al-tarikh, 5:482, 512 and 6:5, 8; al-Fasawi, al-Maʿrifah wa-al-tarikh, 1:142; al-Tabari, Tarikh, 7:455, 495; Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-ayan, 6:321; Ibn ʿIdhari, al-Bayan al-mughrib, 1:78; al-Yafiʿi, Mirat al-janan, 1:361, 396; Ibn Taghri, al-Nujum al-zahira, 2:1; Ibn Qutayba, ʿUyun al-akhbar, 1:9, 129; al-Khafaji, Khizanat al-adab, 3:51; al-Dimashqi, Matalʿ al-budur, 1:15; al-Nayshri, al-Istiqsa, 1:58; Ibn Khaldun, Tarikh, 4:193; al-Sakhawi, Raghbat al-amil, 5:203-204.