1. O grammarian al-Akhfash, listen!
You were friendly, so be brief and do not alienate.

2. You have never been remiss in your love.
Nor have your mother's ribs been smashed.

3. You challenged me to a duel, and in your breath
Was a warning, so stop and do not tear me apart.

4. Abu Hasan, I ask you—
Prepare an answer and do not panic.

5. Is not your father a son of Adam?
So how can you be blotted out and not engraved?

6. Why did you come black-skinned
Rather than piebald like a sand grouse?

7. You were cheated by a heedless father.
No blot in you went unblackened.

8. A father with a bed, and yet
To which desert was he not bedded?

9. By the poems and their markets
And your bargains among the hagglers,

10. And their claims, recognized by the critics
For the excellence of the sincere over the faulty.

11. If you came light-skinned, that would be your nature,
But you came of bright lineage.

12. No one came from his mother
Stranger than the critic Akhfash.

13. O son of she who whored
With the adulterers and took no bribes,

14. Who now mocks openly
Among the vilest of outcasts,

15. Who was not veiled or punished
By the robes of the Danqash.

16. Her privacies were not guarded
By the neck of a eunuch or a castrate.

17. What did you think of one who never reined in
Her lust for men or felt shame?

18. Does she not go about
Like a lustful Sa'id or Danhash?

19. How can she be chaste when in her rear
A blaze rages over the bushes?

20. When her twat's vermin sleep,
The remnants seethe like fermented booze.

21. She cuckolds her husband, saying to him
as he sleeps, "Feign ignorance, as if in a sheep pen!"

22. When she desires, she does not fear his wrath,
For the virile one is just like her, aroused.

23. What do they copulate with but an old hag
Who has submitted to every submitter?

24. Her ass is covered by a rag—inevitably
Like wool on lice it cannot be rid of.

25. If she is mentioned, her mention
Is not easier than the stench of a corpse.

26. My excuse, son of her who does not cease
To be mounted like a fluttering bird,

27. Is that daily they long for some debaucher
Like a dove for its nest.

28. Until he saw in her vagina a longing
For fucking like that of a she-goat in heat.

29. Your black mother brought you,
A baboon in the heat of her bed.

30. She brought you in the blackness of her cunt
With ears the color of apricots.

31. Huge as a hearth, a leader
Tall and unharmed.

32. As if the years of insult upon him
Were the dawn against the deep night.

33. Listen to her stories awake,
For you are stupidly oblivious.

34. Did your mother bring you from a slave girl?
Then if you are blind, do not blink!

35. Do you eat from me and when sated
Still drink from me and remain thirsty?

36. Your blame is deserved and excellent;
We have conveyed it to you ahead of informing.

37. It was clear though the sun had set
And dark though night had not thickened.

38. I say: there came to me that
He will copy my satire with other satires.

39. When fate reverses its laws,
The weakest of men strikes harshest.

40. By the one who colored you black—
The darkness of night and the blindness of mist—

41. You will confess satires that show you
Your death though you live luxuriously.

42. Gently, I will visit you in your bed
And flow as is your habit, unhindered.

43. When they hear it, your mocking verses
Will laugh, though you show no joy,

44. Like the mule who brays when the pilgrim passes,
Though the pilgrim does not rejoice.

45. You will go proudly riding it,
Though you are the lowest of outcasts.

46. You profited and caused me loss.
You shot arrows and I was hit by arrows.

47. In sleep I had relief,
But you stumbled and did not revive me.

48. I am quit of whoever envied me
And did as he wished with impunity.

49. Tomorrow my words will be icy daggers
That will wound—so unsheathe and slash!

50. Do not try to endure your brother's forbearance,
For his arrow will not miss you.

51. You set upon the thorns of his dispraises
Though their thorns cannot be uprooted.

52. Tomorrow the critics will gather
To skin, not adorn, the lamb.

53. And I will make you among them
Target for snakes amid their hissing.

54. You are their ass, accustomed to it,
Yet your circumstance was not readied.

55. Witty, at ease with subtlety,
Yet ignorant, in a desolate place.

56. And I was told that you are enraged
At the heat of my satire and frenzied.

57. Yet you are accustomed to such,
So how did you wilt like withered plants?

58. You were duped by a flash, warning
Of a lightning strike of blazing embers.

59. I see you thought it deception
And were struck down, by my life, without being deceived.

60. Not everyone whose mother whored
Was exposed to the most disgraceful.