1. No solace left but the wine cups' brims
So drink and leave the people's affairs to themselves

2. Youth is gone, lost in griefs aired
To a sympathetic brother or unsympathetic ear

3. Perplexed, observing life's phases
Perplexed, excusing every weakling

4. Then you awoke finding no flowers in the garden of bliss
Only mist and the barbs of despair

5. And a wounded soul whose pain the wretched beholds
So he returns needing one last solace

6. Feeling is the shackle of gloom and sorrow
Rise, let us leave this world

7. And I see that reaching happiness' throne
Is only with wings of obsession

8. It's like an oil painting of the shore where ships and anchors lie
Ships seem to float to your eyes

9. And you almost hear the flutter of the sails
But if you drew closer and touched it

10. You'd find only paint and canvas
A deceitful world and a tasting fate

11. You gain nothing by escaping them
The pleasures you wasted

12. Came back to you distilled in the cup
So tint your vision with them to seem golden

13. Fragrant in colors and breaths
And create with wine for yourself a paradise

14. In the four abandoned places
Where love is a nightingale and a vine

15. Dew and lights upon the trees
Your imagination gives the palace you create a sublimeness

16. Like a palace of walls and ceiling beams
Oh cupbearer, pass around its cups

17. Like the monks' lanterns in the thickets
Forget your worries, happy is not he who remembers

18. Serve the stars for they are gossipy
And make the boon companion's mind and heart drunk

19. No sober mind annoyed like a sober mind
And leave the discourse of politics and reform

20. They cling to the rope of every politician
I cast aside its fruits when I tasted them

21. And found the taste of betrayal in the bunches
And washed my peace of them, washing it

22. Of all foulness and filth
And left them to two fools, a naïve one

23. And a lying sorcerer, rotten cleaner
Who accepts his homeland become colonized

24. And his nation turn into different races
And sells it for counted coins

25. Even if they came from a shoe-shiner
No hypocrite has a deterring conscience

26. What conscience does that bell snake have?
And perhaps a blamer blames me for

27. My silence, though some speech hurts a sympathizer
Two I have not faced harsher than

28. The night's silence and the sensitive poet's
So I answered her harsher and more dreadful than them

29. Was that harsh reprimand in my hearing
You did not know, and it's best you do not know

30. How many horrors and catastrophes lie in silence
She said she thought I'd forgotten, so I said: No,

31. I was neither forgetful nor forgetter
But a wound, whenever I treated it

32. Despondency flooded my senses and perceptions
And had it been in my head, I would have bandaged it

33. But it is in the heart, not in the head
The reformers, I used to aim below them

34. They bound my hands and smashed my bow
And replaced my sword with wooden swords

35. And sold my bow for copper
Fools are no different, though they

36. Were fooled by the shimmer of dew over copper
And if you thought the garden's image

37. Would suffice, that is the utmost bankruptcy
A marble lion, though its shape depicts

38. The shape of a snarling lion, it is no gallant lion
I had a beautiful, genteel dream

39. But I lost it when I lost my sleep
I thought of what we are as a nation

40. And clapped my palms to my cheeks
So I returned as disappointed as could be

41. With high hopes, and as losing as the loser
We hope for salvation from an oppressor by an oppressor

42. A thief is not saved by a thief
And we judge between Pleiades and dirt

43. While our affairs run without measure
We invade other nations seeking glory

44. While our nation is left to people
We almost flatten ourselves on the ground, while in our land

45. Tables and notebooks for foreigners
And we blame those who emigrate for their forgetfulness

46. But the blamer of the forgetful is the first forgetter
And we stay up bragging about blades and spears

47. While our necks are stretched out for the axe
How many cries to fate in our ears

48. Have passed as they passed over milestones?
Their sharp tongues and pretty manners

49. Distract you from every rose and fir in the gardens
I am among them a lion who found his den

50. I am among them a gazelle who found his thicket
My homeland I love more than all the world

51. And my people are most precious in the wild
So long live Syria we live for

52. And long live Lebanon, mark of the head