1. Saddle your steeds, my steed as well
So the dark-skinned girl of my country may sing

2. This lad of seventeen bows
With black eyes without any kohl

3. A poem gave birth to him, mistress of languages
Arabic in causation, and in ecstasy

4. His eloquence from Upper Egypt and his voice
Kisses of Egypt on the brow of the letter Dhad

5. My happiness emerged from metaphor, it preceded him
So he may regain from metaphor my happiness

6. I have a prostration at the Prophet, and a cloak
And from Hejaz to Tangier, my recital

7. From the beginning of my twenties I raise my letters
Above defeat and beauty, my supplies

8. Or whenever the place draws near, the beast of time distances us
And whose hand for my hands

9. We do not complain of distances, the most painful exile
Is the exile of souls in bodies

10. My mother's sons, how can a poet survive
His religion to love, without paying?

11. I believed, even bleeding, a child's finger
Suffices to defeat the harshest tyranny

12. I need to cry with a heart that is buxom
Like a candle when it lights without mourning

13. I listen to the martyr's silence telling me:
Writing is the state of martyrdom

14. The historian lied when he neutrally said:
The weakness of the prey is the temptation of the hunter

15. This standing on neutrality is treason
And poetry, like love, is not neutral

16. The fate of the poem is to record alone
The agony of the victim, not the hand of the executioner

17. I do not obey poetry when it obeys me
Until I am condemned by the critics' obedience?

18. My blood flows high as my blood flows
It nearly pulses the heart of every inanimate

19. In the stand of the arena, I said to the one sleeping
The sleep of treason in the bed of corruption

20. Sleep your fill of your fear, your people's eye did not sleep
Except the sleep of the sword in the sheaths

21. We came to you from the pain of years, our wounds
Bare screams without dressings

22. We told you: Begone - so you smiled at us, blood
With hands of brutality and ashes

23. From which valleys of hell did you come upon us
With the thief, the impostor, and the pimp

24. Release your hyenas as much as you want with our flesh
So we may hear you howl like lions

25. The mother of ancient prophecies sent
Moses to Pharaoh, the pegged

26. It is Egypt, so take off your pride humbly
This soil is for a kneeling worshipper

27. A homeland where the sun concludes its prayers
A light that radiates on the brow of the devout

28. She is the Virgin Mary or she is Hagar
In the wilderness of the desert when she calls

29. My mother, the Mother of the Believers, and a nation
In the caravan of Abraham, he is the guide

30. I thirsted for Hagar as she gave her child water
The good tidings of the honorable prophet

31. Was it enough that we light our candles
Around Christ on the Christmas night?

32. Was it enough that Muhammad appeared
On the night of Al-Isra over the valley?

33. We drowned Pharaoh, mummified,
In the Egyptian museum of ruins

34. A day for Egypt and Egypt a day of blood
We walk to it even on the livers

35. It is the long patience of Job and our patience
For the gloaters in our burning sorrow

36. You did not count their tears as you counted them
And forgot them in the census book

37. They grew far from your auction whenever
They were hungry for every auction to be in indulgence

38. Poor and ordinary whom you did not look upon
And they will astonish you with ordinary beauty

39. They will teach you that January’s rapture
Is the wisdom of ancestors in descendants

40. The battle of spring will be long
Say to autumn: your stubbornness to my stubbornness

41. Summer invented a poem for winter
Rainy, cosmic dimensions

42. O summer, sweeten me, a stranger, so return me
Ripe, harvested in the palm trees of the valley

43. Your reproach and the poor, children of heaven
Do their eyes not settle from my supplies?

44. The seven arid squeezed them, and their fortune
Was the hunger of the stalks in the hand of the reaper

45. Give my mother's eye to sleep reassured
And I wipe the shades of orphanhood from my children

46. Say to my dark-skinned daughter, say to my beloved:
Smile, for between the two smiles are my pillows

47. I grew tired of my sins, and I still travel
In the light until the last of the columns

48. And perhaps my killer's bullet was delayed
For me to complete preparation for the name of Heaven

49. If the alphabet obeyed me as a lover
I would have written you an ode of the Song of Songs

50. And I would have said to Ibn Zureiq, do not write with me
The Euphrates overflows over my ink

51. I have not visited in distant exile a city
Except Baghdad preceded me to it

52. You fear loss, I usually kill a habit
That hurts you with loss, and you get used to it

53. Your hand.. Tenderness, a mother's hand blessed
For the child's hand the cake of holidays

54. And my hand is more tender than longing and my exile
As strong as iron in the blacksmith's forearm

55. And like two caged birds with an embrace
Two freedoms while we are in shackles

56. We may meet in longing until we meet
In longing in cities without grudges

57. Near the Gulf without the swords of tribes
Or in Damascus without wars of ashes

58. In lively Khartoum and youth
In the kiss of the two Niles, cordiality

59. In green Tunis, in Oran
In Sana'a, in Beirut, in Baghdad

60. And perhaps imagination sobbed for us to meet
In Jerusalem or the Church of the Nativity

61. Or in Moroccan beauty crowned
With my poems and eyelined with my joy

62. My homeland is exile and you are far
So when we meet, the countries are my home