1. We collect, and what is collected perishes and is abandoned
We mend, and what is mended wears out and unravels

2. O deluded one, why do you obey delusion? Verily
The life of this world is nothing but the wares of delusion

3. We built structures that decay with time
Yet we revere the next life with buildings that crumble

4. How can there be safety when there is little permanence and the next life
Is better for those who are righteous and you will not be wronged a whit

5. We hope a hope that is obstructed by death
And we take precautions though destiny allows no path

6. Hopes surge in us like surging waves
But judgment belongs to Great Exalted God

7. And we follow a path without knowing that which
Our state on the return journey will follow

8. The world cannot control for itself even a squeak or a wick, indeed
They are just like cattle, nay, more misguided

9. Yet we exert our utmost for love of this
Though the original more deserves such exertion

10. Why adorn whom adornment is not owed?
And what is the life of this world in the Hereafter but wares?

11. Lo the terms have expired morning and night
As they mock your lifespan and laugh

12. By God we cast off the fineries of excavation and abandoned what
Embellished evil deeds making them appear good

13. We anticipate hopes without attaining them
Thus the anticipator attains the goal by attaining

14. Sit the faculties, blink them and their visions, do they watch
But for the Hour to come suddenly? Its portents have come

15. How many sleep comfortably through the night
While others are flung in graves and abandoned

16. What is it with you boasting pride that destroys you
Multiplying until you visited graves

17. And the bliss of our life transforms into plunges
And the whites of our nights frown and dissolve

18. We are frail adorned like emancipated slaves
Ascending by worldly ambitions

19. And the next house is the best house
And best is the house of the righteous

20. When did a day pass without worries of holiness
Nor night without sadness or tears from you

21. You donned the garb of penitents yet ignored the clear path
You are but in clear misguidance

22. When one of us dies, our sorrow flees,
And when we bury him in the grave he dissolves

23. You feel assured without assurance and obey delusion
To the pastures of delusion and deluded by God is delusion

24. Such is this life and this is its way
The deceived and the lofty elder perish

25. May God have mercy upon a people obedient to His command, listeners to His prohibitions
Returning to His obedience, verily we are for God and to Him is the return

26. As for condolences between us they are a sunna
The consoler consoles the bereaved and perishes

27. How long will you outpace as if fixed for eternity?
You will die and they have died

28. How can there be consolation for one for whom in my conscience
There is perpetual grief and anguish over the loss?

29. O mourner you have trodden the path of travelers
That you may be a tomb dweller or of the doomed

30. Three friends with whom the days were adorned
Three solaces to whom I walked

31. As if the calamity had cast them to the ground
And so it overtook them suddenly right then

32. So the claws of death flung at them talons
And they went with the claws clenched around them

33. Congratulations you have died with no disgraceful sins
Nor saddened hearts, nor sullied honor

34. And have not suffered the harms of life and bitterness
Nor were hypocrites in it or ascetics from it

35. And have not known the life nor it known them
And they took from it only what is dissolved

36. To God’s mercy they went and attained
Their wishes and rejoiced in what they clung to

37. Shall I praise enduring, following, and example?
For there remains no dejected or disheveled one

38. If you don the potential for forgiveness from them hoping
For God’s pardon, He pardons and erases

39. So sorrows do not return what has passed
Nor do hardships expand what God has constricted

40. And the rectitude of life is in grief and anguish
That cuts the livers of the bereaved and wounds

41. So let not man rupture what God has ruptured
Nor man constrict what God expands

42. If the matter you hoped for has evaded you
Then abandon it, patience and resignation are best and purer

43. For your grandfather has claimed a stranger and his daughter
Your sweet sap root of contentment

44. And your progeny has been claimed and after them
You will return with neither lineage nor branch entwined

45. So resignation hoping to meet them in the gardens eternal
Immortal, hold fast to what they held fast to

46. And do not let grief between friends
Overcome them, fold, burn, and pull you apart

47. I and you are partners in sorrow
And if what I said was not accurate I do not share in it

48. When God does not erase a grief without another
Or spill tears other than what you have spilled