1. Do you know the house with twisted palm-trees,
The house of that rough, disheveled man,

2. In shiny spaces like blood never wiped away,
Who fooled with flirting and being feminine,

3. With laughter flashing like lightning and chattering,
The jinn glittered with grains of fine sand,

4. I am in earnest and not prone to delay,
In a hurry before the roots are torn out,

5. Writing ink not diluted or adulterated
Or the blowing of bubbled-up bellows,

6. And words are forgotten if they are not cultivated,
If they were not from beyond the mountains of ‘Ath‘ath,

7. My praise of you would not be released from bonds.
So lift up to me Muhammad ibn al-Ash‘ath

8. And mention my name freshly moistened,
With no deceit or corruption,

9. O breath, to an eagle crouching despairingly,
He will thank and protect him from confusion,

10. O breath, to an eagle crouching despairingly,
He will fill the plain of the torrent valley,

11. The path of his excellence is not rugged,
You are of excellent refined praise,

12. You repel the germs of enmity and uproot
The prominence of the ancient, not the new,

13. You won it in an eternal not ruined,
The most generous inherited legacy,

14. At a lofty peak not yet modernized,
Rising above the young eaglets of hawks,

15. On the day when chaos binds on all sides
And the screams of one despairing for help,

16. And the searching of enemy hands groping,
You heal enmity from the evil of gaining bits here and there,

17. And when matters are confused and disordered,
You filled the mouths of barking dogs

18. With gravel of grit and dust of rubble,
Until they bargained for the least worthless thing,

19. You hasten on when you are not sent out,
With the strength of the resolute, not soiled,

20. When its reins are entangled, they are not severed,
And they have tasted your strength like a fierce lion,

21. Who gave Abu Sarah the bitterness of dissolution,
The strangler thought he would uproot

22. Whatever he wished of the doors of vile earnings,
But the torrent swept him away in a filthy valley,

23. Thus was the affair of the corrupt, ruined one,
Like one wearing out shoes of dung,

24. And the crow saw the evil of his nourishment
The face of al-Walid in blood defiled,

25. The Turks and Kurds, if you do not trap them,
For good, and they were pelted with filthy scraps,

26. You left them as meat for prowling wolves,
Captive and killed in the muddy marshland,

27. By the mountain passes of Tanbuk and Awbath,
If you swear an oath you do not break it,

28. And they confessed after shameful flight,
When the hoof laid bare what was not dug up,

29. Salt and sulfur in the mud of slick water,
Abu Sarah has no confusion,

30. As he is with the swords and not bewildered,
And at the heat of earnest battle,

31. Help from the helper who brings victory is slow,
War gives a pearl that was not nursed,