1. Is it you? Or is this my imagination
Your beauty...and between us is the sea of nights?

2. My Cairo! Do you remember my face
That is tortured by your beauty?

3. Ask the beautiful girls whom
I composed the book of nights for them

4. Ask your father the Nile, he testifies
To my sincerity in estrangement and reunion

5. Ask the pyramids about Osfoof's love
Who hid his tears among the sands

6. Ask the five years about me
Which my life sacrificed! The years of peak attributes

7. I come back to you...and the days are paralyzed
Shredded by years...and don't care

8. Alas! Your lover has returned old
Fleeing from gloominess to boredom

9. I falter when I stand with the burden of my clothes
And stumble when I walk in the shadows

10. Will you be astonished when you forget my face?
I forgot its fleeting features!

11. I passed by the houses...and put in them
A lost stranger among the men

12. Neither does the window flickers Slawa
Nor does Hend peek from above

13. Nor does the cafe buzz when it sees me
Nor does anyone ask how I am

14. And where are the friends.. Have they all
Passed away as youth..to the inevitable end?

15. So I'd write them.. for the gazelle's eyelids
And poetry would entice me the young women

16. As misguidance entices one to stray
So I'm saddened by the answer...and the question

17. My Cairo! We parted for a third of a century
Can I tell you what was revealed to me?

18. I traversed the desert plains..until
My feet complained of the long journey

19. And sailed the sea..with my sail
Pushing me to the unknown..in the islands of the impossible

20. And I embraced happiness in its glory
And adversity overturned me on the spears

21. I sipped victory..and gulped defeat
So the honey died in the poison of mortality

22. I became shallow...and the clamour of friends around me
And I became deep...though the cores hurt like arrows

23. And I returned from battles..I don't know
Why I wasted my life in fighting

24. And what about you? Have you experienced after me
The terrors that break mountains?

25. And have you suffered what I suffered..a wound
That the doctor frowns at! Without healing?

26. Do I see a glimmer of a teardrop in your eyes
That turned you, my love, to my state?