1. It is fitting for an exile to weep for his home
With tears from eyes that never dry up at sunset

2. A home far away has wearied me
Its blossoms and fragrance before separation

3. Yearning in the soul for its pigeons
When the beloved is absent after being near

4. It faded away, and left no comfort against anxiety
Except what I find palatable from tranquility

5. So God has withered the branches of union
Made humid by the decree of separation

6. And God has nights that stretch into the horizon
My weeping for the like of them and their weeping

7. Whenever the self remembers it, it melts like mercury
And the recollection of the days of meeting melts it

8. My heart’s nights in passion as though
What slept at night fretted their hearts

9. The closest company to us whenever
The morning guard left Layla

10. Happy are those nights and their goodness
Happy are their kindness and sins

11. She does not cease to grieve in separation
Sobbing in longing as the train answers her

12. With more yearning than my heart for the enclosure
When the winds blow from it

13. After you, my stay in the abode has been long
Should I shed the tears of a downcast eye?

14. I am not a listener in its environs
Suffering the pain of reproach

15. Perplexed, I ask every razed edifice
My tears are my wine and sickness is my comrade

16. And many a frightened, dejected lover
Deprived of sleep, famished by separation

17. He who loves a fawn is exposed to calamities like
Alienation, sharp swords

18. He rests when the zephyr blows to him
At dawn - that is the caprice of the ardent lover

19. Parched is he whose thirst cannot be quenched
One day by its fresh overflowing cup

20. Grieving to the ruins after his departure
The pain of separation and the bitterness of sorrow

21. Suffering, he says about his moment in ecstasy
Were you not lighter than trivial in your evanescence?

22. And for the wound of his heart the day of bliss
You were not of a wound flooded with it

23. I exhausted in this rapture every provision
I prepared from early youth and prime

24. I stood and asked every desolate abode
About a neighbor with two marks of separation

25. Burdened with the lords of the chambers, I implored
Under branches of creeping vines

26. Time has passed and I see nothing of their promise
Except procrastination and evasion

27. From every gazelle with a slender waist
Above a waist like a bundle of firewood

28. When their slender spears rise up
They mimic spears writing from sharpening

29. O you whose journey to the meadows was prolonged
My confusion over long distances and my disdain

30. Over every desolate caravan
Crossing the terrible, frightful desert

31. I rouse it longing for the place of rest
Its shade and familiar dwellings

32. For there the moons of the cheeks adorn it
Their halos in a square and summer land

33. And there I spent my youth willingly
Detained by the sentence of passion

34. No garden the train lavished
But a singer with dangling tresses and gentle voice

35. The breeze walking slowly in it
Like the gait of a drunk overflowing

36. It restores the plants throughout
Between embroidery and pleating

37. One day in finer poetry than the gleaming
Pearl I threaded like matched pearls

38. My thoughts pour it out until its sea swells
Neither ebbing nor subsiding

39. So poverty, when I befriend it, comes to you
Organized like linked pearls

40. However little of it is a splendid necklace
Or if less, then a valuable anklet

41. With every rhyme when I recite it
It rises like wafting fragrance

42. It came easily so whenever I considered it
With the mind it was no longer elusive

43. It comes refined in eloquence, noble
From a soul with easy lead, noble