Ode XCV: By thy life ! I am

By thy life ! I am a man who defends stoutly his folk, no fighter unskilled in the day of trouble ;

I give generously to strangers who come from afar to seek my bounty, and I withhold it not from those who are my kin or bound to me by covenant ;

And not in me will ye find — know it well !— grovelling before any, nor am I puffed up with arrogance.

Seest thou not that we are the sling-stone of wars ? we flow in a flood [over our foes] as though we were the surge of a sea.

When we face the enemy, we clothe ourselves in the fells of lions, the skins of leopards.

We pasture where we choose in the lands of 'Abs and Tayyi' her ally, and in the lands of Bakr,

Though each of them be our unsparing enemy, smarting from a fresh wound, bent on vengeance.