Abu Nuwas, The Legendary Man of Verse

A gentle fawn passed around the cup
Delicate of waist and slim of flank,
“Will you be on your way, come morn?” he chirped.
“How can we bear to leave?” came the reply.
He glided among us and made us drunk,
And we slept, but as the cock was about to crow
I made for him, my garments trailing, my ram ready for butting.
When I plunged my spear into him
He awoke as a wounded man awakes from his wounds.
“You were an easy kill,” said I, “so let’s have no reproaches.”
“You win, so take what you will, but give me fair reward.”
So after I had placed my saddle bag upon him he burst into song,
“Are you not the most generous rider ever, of all Allah’s creatures?”

Abu Nuwas is considered one of the greatest gay poets of all time. he wrote at a time when homosexuality was not nearly as taboo as it is now. He did spend time in prison for his various transgresions, and in that vein, he had Oscar Wilde beat by about 1300 years.

His mother, a persian, sold him into slavery as a child. He was fathered by a soldier from Damascus. The man who bought him, a druggist from Basra, would later free him and they lived as lovers for the years of his young manhood.

Eventually he would go on to study with Khalaf al-Ahmar, a master or pre-Islamic poetry and live amongst the Bedouins.

his verses celebrate what he considered the finer things in life, and while he went on to recieve the patronage of several Caliphs, he was ocasionally jailed for his love of alcohol and unrepentant atraction to men.

Eventually, a later Caliph even hired him to be the private mentor of the son and heir of the Caliph and a great bit of his love poetry of that era of his life is dedicated to that relationship.

he became a living legend and was even written about in the great work, The Thousand Nights And A Night, a collection of ancient tales from Persia, India, and Arabia dating to the ninth century.

He will forever be a hero of mine.