1. Your excuse, from inspired poets who led
The rhyme scheme and fragrant metre

2. And Lebanon, dawn of God's creation, is the truest
And firmest in its early beauty

3. From its eyes, light, and from its heart, passion
So your Lord in Lebanon loves and watches

4. Lebanon is from Eden a forehead and fontanel
Kauthar flowed in it and perfumed basil bloomed

5. The sweetest who sang of Lebanon is a nightingale
On whose lips stood to love a pulpit

6. From his throat scatters the gold of profit
And Lebanon is the most luminous and freest land

7. The most generous who sang of Lebanon is a poet
Whose brides surpass dictionaries, perfected

8. Stingy with sips of generosity, honoured
And frolicking in the pasture of beauty, scattering

9. The cave companion of poetry saw me and said
Guidance from him came to me so I rose to preach

10. I teach the night wanderers of passion how to find guidance
And those touched deep in their veins how to feel

11. And the ancestors from the place of exaltation told me
We grew by it, and merit with merit grows

12. And our children are a repository for our seeds
We are honoured or shamed by them when we sow

13. And eloquence told me, I envied his tongue
So from an eloquence, poetry was refined excellence

14. And if this poetry seems narrow but composed
No harm, the generous one is composed

15. He slept in the streams of the sun, his sweet rhetoric
So his spontaneous speech is illuminatingly clear

16. And Lebanon, green like passion, passed by him
So his inspiration is like love, lush and green

17. Did he come modest from the countryside and stand
To atone for the eloquent ones of the age?

18. And the Baroque told me, his poetry passed by
My amber so musk never cleaved, and ambergris

19. My drink, clustered with the sugar of his words
And my perfume, fermented over it

20. I saw myself in it, so the breeze is unsullied
Its passages, and thickets flowering, flourishing

21. And the Shouf has spirits that gently tremble
At his revelation, and revelation is the path of the soul

22. In every pasture the Shouf includes stragglers
And in every shack the Shouf includes Ja'far

23. In every subservient, stubbornness entrenched
And in every drunkard, chastity fortified

24. And Abu Su'ada said, I greeted his poetry
As if I still roar in it

25. And I love Lebanon, its forehead roams
And it was only truth in us knotted

26. We are the offspring of beauty and its soldiers
So only beauty in us is sovereign

27. And if the marble of yesterday stripped my home
In inherited morals, unruly marble remains

28. You tired but did not despair, and ones like you give hope
Your poetry in the world is the pure pigeon

29. So from mountain to rocky shore
Those who carry hopes do not shatter