1. I ransom you from the oppression of tyrants,
We strive to please you, yet you show displeasure.

2. You see but the hearts' love for you,
So wrongs taste sweet and avoidance is pleasant.

3. Between pleading hands and flowing tears,
Are coaxing and drawing you near.

4. We knew you in youth to be faithful,
How is it the water of that pact is now drying up?

5. You were harsh, and I never knew your heart to be rock,
Your essence of flowing kindness more apt.

6. Have mercy like the Nile's stream on souls
That without your mercy will perish and rot.

7. And gentle with livestock, bellies empty,
Their food is grass and scarcity their drink.

8. Their Lord sleeps grieving their plight,
Folding up like the nights, lamenting and weeping.

9. This wasteland once lived as a meadow,
Its fertility changing in manifold hues.

10. It had all the eye desired of elegance and sights,
That hearts crave and long to imbue.

11. Yet the arrows of misery kept striking it down,
The arrows of misery never miss their mark.

12. Until it became a wasteland, no flourishing branch
Waving in melody, or garden to embark.

13. The moist saplings envied its softness,
Now like deaf stone or harder in its stark.

14. So stretch out a hand, white of yours, and provide
All the good it hopes for and humbly does ask.

15. We have only tears as our means to you,
For like draws to like, that is the golden clasp.

16. There was redemption in the outpouring of tears,
If one like you were doing the castigating rasps.

17. We lost you like a child loses its mother,
None left to caress him or rock in their lap.

18. You were but the soul that left its body,
How arid for me now is life in your lapse!

19. If ingratitude banished you from us,
And estrangement, a teacher so apt,

20. Ever constant in gratitude and its grasp.
Perhaps you left the land to water its gardens,

21. With blood in the regions south streaming unsurpassed,
But the free scorn acting above their worth,

22. Demeaning and questionable in all that they aspire and grasp.
Who would want life when it is marred

23. By injustice, sustenance with bloodied clasp?
Yet people's hearts have mercy for people,

24. A mother suckles them, a father does their unruly brood amass.