A tragic story lived by the poet Urwa bin Hizam, as his poverty prevented him from realizing his life’s dream of marrying his cousin, whom he loved since his childhood and who loved him as well.. so what is their story? How was the fate of the poet?
Urwa loved his cousin Afra, and his uncle promised him to marry her to him, when he said to him when he grew up and grew up: She is your wife after a while, except that his uncle’s wife saw him poor and stood in the way of his marriage to her daughter, and his uncle asked him to go and seek a livelihood for him, and he stipulated 80 camels dowry, and so on the advice of his wife.
After Urwa went to Yemen to seek livelihood, a well-to-do man from the Levant came and proposed to Afra, so her mother insisted on her father until he accepted her marriage to him, and the man carried her to the Levant.
A year later, Urwa returned with 100 camels, but the surprise was that his uncle told him that Afra had died, and he took him to a pile of stones and said: This is her grave. Urwa continued to frequent the place for days until a girl from the neighborhood told him the truth, so he panicked, supplied himself, and went to the Levant.
Afra’s husband went down as a guest without telling him his lineage, and in the morning Urwa put his ring in the bottom of the milk and asked the slave girl to push the heel into Afra.
When the husband returned, Urwa introduced himself to him, so the husband decided that he should stay, so Urwa insisted on leaving, so the man realized that love had damaged him and that there was no cure for him, and he promised him to divorce Afra, but Urwa refused, shyness and generosity, and he left immediately.
Death
And the poet’s body continued to emaciate and dissolve until it became skin on bone, and his companions stopped with him on the way to the fortune teller Al-Yamamah, then the fortune teller Najd, so they did not know his medicine.
And the poet Urwa died before he reached his home, and before his death he said his poem that he was known for, and among its verses:
My boyfriend from Alia, Hilal bin Amer, is in Sanaa, Auja, today, and he is waiting for me
When will you remove my shirt, the harm from ‘Afra will become clear to me, boys
So you see a little flesh, a softer bone, and a perpetually fibrillating heart
My liver is sore from the love of Afra, and my eyes are shrouded from those who find it