1. Angel of Ali, I have not ceased to praise Muhammad,
So my thoughts of you are full of kindness.

2. With you, all of time is radiance that I own nothing of,
As the horizons have been folded up, neither drink nor apportionment.

3. These days are nothing but
Purified pages folded up, and you are their seal.

4. So your palms' friendship and the dew have not parted,
Nor have the opposites of your honor and blame accompanied each other.

5. And how much lightning whose clouds I feared,
But I smelled clouds whose lightning face frowned.

6. I wished to grasp the meter’s rhythms and collection
And grammar’s acts of assimilation, insertion, and suppression.

7. I neglected rhymes when I sought his gifts,
So here I am with neither bounty nor bounty’s plenty.

8. Increasing in concealment despite his evident merit
And evil, as poison hides within honey.

9. I was like one guided by a star in the night,
But when dawn rose, the star set.

10. Whether he desires it or waits for it to be ruled.
I will sail the Nile as it surges

11. With stinginess—no, darker than the obscured moon.
How many a goblet has missed its prize

12. And how many an arrow, after being trusted, has missed.
Join my kinship’s rope to Syria and its people,

13. For you have many flawless hands with me.
They shine and restrain each frightening palm,

14. So neither the world’s injustice nor tyranny is feared.
I have been schooled only by a revered Scripture,

15. Against the war of fate it is peace.
In its verses is Jesus son of Mary’s proof,

16. By it the sick are healed or the deaf hear.
If recited in a murky valley, guidance shines forth,

17. And if read in an assembly, reason bows down.
Embroidered like a meadow in every rise and fall

18. And adorned in every depression and height with beauty.
If you do not find me a eloquent praiser,

19. Then prose and verse have betrayed me.