1. Alas! Has she come to know how I have grieved since her loss?
My tears I cannot hold back as they overflow.

2. They stream from my eyes when passion is aroused,
And patience cannot overcome this fervent love.

3. Profuse are the tears that pour from my eyelids,
As if some had reached the seas and replenished them.

4. Before we parted I feared her,
As a lion fears the darkness of nightfall.

5. I dread the inevitable fate,
For can death be averted?

6. When the news of her death reached me,
It was as if a quail had alighted upon my grieving heart.

7. In my misery, I could not rend my garment,
But instead honored it by leaving it intact.

8. What pained me most was finding no way,
Despite my experience, to lessen the pain of losing her.

9. When God decreed her death,
I was left behind, my heart still sorrowing for her.

10. The day she passed was one of mourning for my tribe,
Bending over her bier with graying beards.

11. It humbled the proud men,
As they grasped the ground with their hands.

12. Honor shrank from her, though she was once surrounded by it,
So that her master now seemed to her a servant in disgrace.

13. How many hearts must burn with sorrow!
How many tears must excoriate the cheeks!

14. It is forbidden, now that she is hidden from me,
That I look upon people, except with glances I will never repeat.

15. To me, the love of one who hopes for union
Is equal to one whose love I've spurned.

16. Far from me is the thought that I could be consoled
By seeking the comforts and luxuries of life!

17. Where but in her can recompense be found?
For she alone attained the heights of virtue.

18. Solace evades me, remaining out of reach,
For how can the soul be solaced when she is not here?

19. Yet within my chest, O censurer, are wounds
That refuse to be silenced by reproach and rebuke.

20. I wish that on the day we are brought together,
God would take from my side all that her love has stored within it.

21. When death took her from me, it was as if it took me too,
So a pox on my soul when God decreed her loss!

22. O Time, does each day and night bring a new calamity
That loosens the fetters binding me so I bear its burden?

23. I reached maturity but did not attain maturity’s understanding,
As she was hurried from me before she could reach her prime.

24. I gained the finest thing my aspirations held,
And surpassed in the mother of afflictions her due bounds.

25. So my heart, why are you so hardened, as if
Ambitions are conversing with you to reclaim her?

26. I did not wish that you would be stoic today
While the youths of the tribe call you steadfast.

27. Is it not an eternal parting, without hope of reunion,
An absence of travel with no wish for her return?

28. Wear sorrow like the garment of a devoted worshipper,
Robed in his clothes with no desire to renew them.

29. And fast from those who tempt you to patience - they
Are kindling a fire God has fueled and lit.

30. Others before you sought blessings hanging
On the mountains of bliss, grazing securely.

31. They would meet in the darkness fearing no suspicion
And dreading no evil in the nights' machinations.

32. But the disease of misery destroyed the gazelles of Suiqa
And scattered the beasts from the thickets of Tudmur.

33. It breached the kings' retreats and did not spare
Their nobility, nor there did it curb its havoc.

34. Each day and night it advances slowly upon them
Until it overtakes them in their neglect.

35. How many bands slept one night in fortunate shade
Only to have ill luck make their fortune fade!

36. It destroyed what they had built up
And stripped them of what they had rendered strong.

37. Greetings and mercy to the land of Tuff,
Whose provisions God beholds as He ignites its beacons!

38. May its graves never lack, on any day or night,
Sustenance from the gardens of God they obtain.

39. So in it are many body parts of a people it made ready,
To give what they sought, to those who readied them.

40. By God, among them is a grave I came to willingly
And deposited my religion, then my life, within its hollow.

41. I turned away, brushing the soil off a hand
That brushed away the dust of the tomb and its façade.

42. Nothing consoled me except that my neighbor,
God decreed, would be laid to rest beside her.

43. When I cracked open her tomb
Before the martyred witness of God, I fulfilled my vow.

44. How can she fear evil on the day of her reckoning,
When she has made of God's warriors her troops?

45. On the Day of Resurrection she will grasp
The fold of a people who do not care about her limits.

46. They will defend the One who granted them His support,
And pardon her faults however He deemed fit.