1. You were not stingy in repaying favors, like your peers,
O Abu Ayyoub!

2. And I see you just as generous in your bounty
To riders on your mounted beast.

3. You have become like a camel that expects
No reward of thanks or recompense.

4. You are not among the living, the one who is cajoled and flattered,
Nor the dead, who is mourned and eulogized.

5. You have shown only harshness and roughness
Without your slightest wish being fulfilled.

6. It is as if you are the jujube tree displaying
Thorns to ward off those who would strip it bare.

7. If your requester had been a noble man,
I would have excused your door barred and locked.

8. O guest of his! Rejoice, for you will gain
The reward of fasting, though unrecorded.

9. If he could find a way to nullify your reward through some trick—
He would have devised the most cunning of schemes!

10. And I see—his allowing you to fast teaches him
That forced fasting is not counted.

11. Or he thinks his guest cannot really fast
While enduring his abuse and insults.

12. Does he think his absence breaks the faster's fast?
Shame on him and his fabricated assumption!

13. Do not consider a man insulting you to be a disgrace,
For there is no disgrace in his insults.

14. His cheeks and eyelids sag—his face confirms
His ugliness with its permanent frown.

15. You always see him kneeling with unkempt hair
Like a crucified body left hanging.

16. His illnesses follow one another continuously,
No cure can heal except that of the grave.

17. The Healer of guests grants health to his guest
From every sickness but the rabid dog's bite.

18. The breathless gasp relief from his oppressiveness—
No sigh of the anguished escapes him.

19. Oh what regrets! My poem that began
With praise of him ends with dispraise!

20. I will change my praising him to disparaging him
And my poetry will make his mother the subject of shameful taunts!