Gazing through the

         night and its stars,

  or the grass and its bugs,

I know in my heart these swarms

are the craft of surpassing wisdom.

  Think: the skies

      resemble a tent,

   stretched taut by loops

and hooks;

and the moon with its stars,

  a shepherdess,

    on a meadow

      grazing her flock;

and the crescent hull in the looser clouds

  looks like a ship being tossed;   

    a whiter cloud, a girl

      in her garden

        tending her shrubs;

  and the dew coming down is her sister

      shaking water  

      from her hair onto the path;

  as we

    settle in our lives,

like beasts in their ample stalls—

  fleeing our terror of death, 

    like a dove

        its hawk in flight—

though we’ll lie in the end like a plate,

    hammered into dust and shards.

Translated by Peter Cole
From Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid
Source: http://books.google.se/books?id=wg5yuY1DAmUC&printsec=frontcover