1. I complain to God of what I have suffered from chronic
conjunctivitis, prolonging the pain of my wakefulness at dawn,

2. As if the lining of my eyelids at their edges
Were an army of ants marching in the wings of night,

3. As if the grit and tears in the muddy hollows
Were legs plucked from them, injuring me,

4. As if the pains of my heart from being stabbed
With thorns between my lashes and my lashes

5. Were a swelling in the eye overflowing
With its shores casting sparks upon my lids,

6. Gushing water from them each time a slumber
Laid upon them a fire upon fire,

7. How many a night have I spent yellow from the misery of it
And from imagining a dawn of journeys,

8. While my eyelids kept the sleep of my little son Qasim
Who wet-nurses nourished with just enough milk

9. In a circle of darkness where no edge can be seen
In which gleams from the teeth of dawn appear,

10. As if the east were an unjust man who saw wrong
In paying them camphor dissolved in saliva,

11. As if the sun had been returned to a circuit
Above people steady, not revolving,

12. As if the night were ignorant and so did not see
In the coin of the moon any taking of its dinar.

13. My eyelid complains to my eyelid like its own
Affliction, as harm is shared between neighbor and neighbor.

14. So praise be to God, the course of light from darkness,
And maker of the night with soothing stones.

15. How far people were in a matter their conjectures
Brought near, while my malady was near cure by the Creator!