Without Thee What Are Song and Dance to Me?

Armenian Legends and Poems [1916] at sacred-texts.com

p. 85

WITHOUT THEE WHAT ARE SONG AND DANCE TO ME?

BY SAYAT NOVA

WITHOUT thee what are song and dance to me?
The castagnettes I throw down wearily.
My heart and thoughts are ever filled with thee,
So rhymes and verses leave me, one by one.

How can one bandage serve for gashes twain?
How on two masters wait a single swain?
Would not one gardener tend two groves in vain?
For he must graft the saplings one by one.

Well said our fathers, speaking of such woes,
"I made a garden, others plucked the rose.
Theirs was the sweetness, mine the thorny close."
In sooth these things befell me one by one!

Without thee what are riches unto me?
What worth could I in silks or cashmeres see?
Arrayed in rags and sackcloth I would be,
Wandering around the convents, one by one,

To meet perchance with some one, who might tell,
My fair one, how to free me from thy spell;
For Sayat Nova's torments far excel
The Seven Wise Men's complaints told one by one!