1. Spare me your denunciation, O critic,
And deem that tears are all I desire.

2. Weep not until years of youth have faded;
Tears shed in youth suffice to make one cry.

3. When tears become a place their owner haunts,
Tears flow from his eyes disquieting the heartbroken.

4. Fate guarded him with flashing lightning in fever,
When weakness hid itself, yearning refused to hide.

5. God spared a victim of youth’s madness one to complain to,
I complained to Him who made me weak in complaint.

6. I conceal the torment of love lest I destroy it,
While my eyes overflow with tears – eyes aware of torment.

7. I let tears flow continually, their course wounds,
I cut off sighs, though their paths wound.

8. I remembered when the arrows of love went astray
And days shot arrows, crazed with love.

9. How many a night revived the souls of love-possessed ones
Embracing – neither dying nor living.

10. The day we saw life trembling gloriously
With the bashfulness of the brightest, reddest wine,

11. We mixed it in goblets while the horizon was vacant
Until the horizon appeared in a stunning dress.

12. From it drinks greeted every desirer,
The men of Persia heading them, Kisra himself.

13. We were greeted and given to drink in the glass falsely,
For we had realized the greeting and the giving to drink.

14. The pourer of wine clothes it, yet in its drinker’s hand,
It is stripped bare.

15. On a vast, well-watered night, it spread its porch
Across the horizon, until it seemed wrapped in a double cloak.

16. It bound gazes in its veil,
As if vision beyond it was blind.

17. I searched it until I saw its cloak
Embroidered with a ray of dawn never folded up.

18. A hidden path appeared to us as if,
When it stretched out, a creeping serpent sped along it.

19. To a master who gives his praise as wealth;
He takes what remains and gives away that which perishes.

20. And a white conceals every glorious white
When he appears alone – he is the nearest to him.

21. Of knotted ends, of yellow complexion,
Composed of diverse parts,

22. Every visitor dispersed from her children.
Woe to you, mother! How barren and devoid of warmth!

23. When he flew from her, he swooped down on every mound,
Like an ostrich swooping down on discarded skins.

24. If he strayed from a soul, loss guided him back to it.
None before him were guided back by loss.

25. You came upon him while the fates were twisting
Their tongues into the necks of every twisting youth.

26. You turned pale and the colors shivered in fright,
The white of the gazelle’s belly bled, the red of the wild cows perished.

27. You supported Abdullah in might and generosity,
Never swerving from his exemplary path.

28. You raised poetry after its decline
Through your nobility to the pinnacle of poetry.

29. How many praises whose luck was meager smiled
As the meadow smiles, thriving without rain!

30. Praise revealed my merit to the envious,
Wherein the abasement of the slave to the Master was revealed.

31. It circles the wilds of earth while fettered
By a rhyme - time wears away but it does not.

32. No binding of praise I composed
And expatiated on harmed that it should outlive the living.