1. We stood at the grave of Ala' bin Sa'eed
With mouths like the nests of ants

2. Visiting a stranger who longs for no passions
Nor complains of the loss of intimate friends

3. With your life, be not miserly in answering us
Whenever you are not shy of the request of a questioner

4. How can you answer the questioners while between them
And you are layers of earth and worms

5. I cried for you, for one whose neck is wrung by grief
And for the blind adversary of every right with falsehood

6. My master, you have washed away humiliation from the face of the free
And have conveyed from him the words of every conveyor

7. With downcast eyes, soaring worries
Ruffle the flocks of pouring tears

8. Indeed you have born long sorrow and regret
That shake their dwellings at dawn and at nightfall

9. You have journeyed to the unknown lands and villages
And did not provision yourself for the journey of a rider

10. You have left people who see their lives
While destiny has led you to one of its twisting paths

11. As if you did not hamper any she-camel of your companions
So a rider eats of it while one on foot

12. Leaving in the wilderness a she-camel
Whose limbs will cook them in the cooking pots

13. A young man who aids his master and forgives his ignorance
Is neither blamable nor reproachable

14. I turn my eyes among the people but I do not see
Other than one heedless of our heedlessness

15. Zayd accuses Mazeed of idiocy
While the grave of Hakeem is like the grave of an ignorant one

16. And I swear this world is no abode of settlement
It is but like some of the lodgings

17. We travel towards our deaths, hoping around them
And live out our days travelling the stages

18. We eat its pasture, so it eats us through it
It has sought our souls through hardships

19. I climb its side with armor, for it
Enriches the bellies of the earth with the bellies of the pregnant

20. Calamities had taken you before it
So no misfortune escaped your eyelids

21. Give the days, they were not lenient with you, O Ibn Thabit
Were you to accuse them of reproaching a reproacher?

22. And who is he that desires the changes of his life
And is content with the days other than a flatterer?

23. Make its turns few, every little turning,
And live safely, O best cautioning companion

24. For what is rubbed into the earth
Is like the last the hands of fate will guide