Classical Arabic literature scholarship considered qaṣīda a genre that substantiates the political ruler’s legitimacy and endowed it with a structure that reflects a linear narrative: The poet first encounters ruins that signify time’s dilapidating effects in the naṣīb; then he reaches the ruler who protects him against the destructive fate in the madīḥ. This scholarship thus characterized ruins (aṭlāl), in Stefan Sperl’s words, as objects “sublimated by the everlasting ‘House of Glory’. . . whose ‘builder’ is the sovereign.” I argue, however, that qaṣīdas map empires to locate ruins that refuse sublimation to the ruler’s order. I analyze ruins as a textual trope in the poems of Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī, and al-Mutanabbī, and situate my observations within material history: Islamic imperial centers such as Damascus and Baghdad incorporated ruins into construction projects, which substantiated rulers’ claim to maintain a just order and claim a lineage that went back to Solomon and Alexander. At various sources including the Qur'ān, tafsīr, and poetry, the term “ʿimāra” means populating, constructing, and civilizing, and shares the same root with “ʿamara,” to fill with life. Mufradāt alfāẓ al-Qur'ān defines ʿimāra as “the antonym of ruins.” Poetry exposes ruins that empire construction (ʿimāra) could not erase. The madīḥ did not necessarily mean that the poet found refuge in a ruler who sublimates ruins, but instead reveal that the empire’s political order that fails to subjugate ruins cannot attain the impeccable craft and symmetry in poetry’s textual order. This alternative framework for the qaṣīda genre reveals a rivalry that attains visibility only via textual analysis informed by material history. The poet becomes like a collector that gathers in his text ruins, otherwise dispersed and unattended in the empire, and subtly challenges the patron/ ruler. Ruins, hitherto unruly traces that symbolized destruction, become the foundations for a verbal construction that—unlike imperial constructions— stands the test of time.