1. The summer left no trace or ruins,
No dry stalks to be gleaned, no chaff.

2. It is right for the autumn to be wept
Like youth, play, and flirtation weep.

3. Time has turned good fortune to ill,
Making what was once right, now wrong.

4. Winter and summer can find no words
To please the ear save bounty and dearth.

5. See how the earth scowls, the pebbles quake,
The horizon brawls with swelling storm clouds.

6. Who claims summer’s brightness is undimmed?
Even the mountains now make no such claim.

7. Tomorrow it will wear a coat of fur on its head,
Not torn by flints or by the twisting thongs.

8. When the Khurasan night unveils her teeth,
Bared at us, they snatch limbs for gnawing.

9. Glowering, he rises and sleeps in his lair,
Moving from tribe to desolated tribe.

10. Who did not know the span of his wall in both settlements
And the full reach of his tempest stirring the sands?

11. His ribs and entrails know this, as his kidneys do –
That he is the intrepid hero and brave warrior.

12. He girded himself for battle without his armor –
What era shall we see him then in full array?

13. When God gives success attending a thing,
Sprouting from the needs and hopes that flourish,

14. My prayers, if prayers can temper hot outrage,
Are nothing but riding and high-humped camels.

15. You tame the willful, gently lead the strayed,
Bring far exile home to safe return.

16. You draw the distant raider near when you don
Take up your arms of sifting sands and shifting dunes.

17. Find yourself suddenly bereft of a land?
Be steadfast. All honour except in abasement.