From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

In the midst of this, a friend came to see me,
a man of wealth and status now so thin
that only skin remained to clothe his bones.
“Tell me,” I said, “what misery is this?”
“Have you no common sense?” he answered me.
It’s wrong to ask what you already know.
Our distress has reached its final limit!
‘No rain falls; no smoke rises to heaven.’”

“But I don’t understand why you’re concerned.
Poison only kills if there’s no antidote!
Someone else might die from deprivation,
but not you. Why would a duck fear a tempest?”
That learned man grew even more enraged,
eyed me like a sage eyes an idiot.
“My dear friend,” he said, “a man safe on shore
will never sit at ease while his friends drown.
It’s true I’ve not grown gaunt because I’m poor;
watching poor men suffer has made me so.
No prudent man would ever want to witness
his own or someone else’s ragged wounds.
You’re right: I have enough to not be wounded,
but the wounds of others send shivers through my flesh.
May anyone like me who has enough
be deprived of ease if he stands idly by.
Each time I see a darvish going hungry,
my own food turns to poison in my mouth.
If a man’s friends are languishing in prison,
how can he take pleasure in a garden?”