My yearning (1) is just as separation decrees,
and desire grows whenever the place of meeting is far.

My night (2) since they left is endlessly long—
where have my former, fleeting nights gone?

Wakefulness has ruled over my eyelids;
for me, night and day are now the same.

Sleeplessness after their withdrawal is abundant,
while the sleep I catch since they departed is but a wink (3).

Who, then, can lend us eyes that sleep? And do you think an eye (4)(5) can ever be borrowed?

No radiant dawn breaks my night,
and the passion that consumes me admits no cure (6).

How many a passer-by, while the camp was setting out
and the stirred-up dust veiled their departure, cried:

“To linger among the ruins while still alive,
after the companions have gone, is a disgrace to you.”

He also composed this do-bayt quatrain (7):

How much of this lifetime slips away in loss!
How heedless (8) I have been, how forgetful.

I wasted all my days in idle play—
O life, is there after you another life (9)?

Someone later saw him in a dream and asked, “What did Allah Most High do with you?” He answered in verse, in the meter al-madīd:

I once (10) feared the weight of my sin—
that fear has now been lifted.

My soul is safe from its perils;
only when I died, O (11) man, did I truly live.

May Allah have mercy on him and pardon him.

Jalal al-Din Taksh (12)—it is also said that his name was Mahmud ibn ʿAlaʾ al-Din, Khwarazm Shah Muhammad ibn Taksh al-Khwarazmi,