1. The caller to death in the wilderness has called
To awaken those drowning in the sleep of old age.

2. All are intoxicated with love of this lowly life, so none
Of them awakened or became sober.

3. Each day a warner arose from the dead
Calling out, but none would heed his call.

4. Man suffers and builds throughout his life,
Yet death comes demolishing all he built.

5. O face of she who wrote down the decree,
Her beauty was erased by deletion one day.

6. Yesterday we saw her a full moon,
Today we are content with a crescent, nothing more.

7. O daughter of Moses, God called you
From Mount Sinai just as He called him before.

8. Moses split the raging sea with his staff,
While you split hearts without a staff.

9. You were ahead of some people of the earth,
And today you have become one of the people of the sky.

10. Death has mercilessly pierced its arrows in you
Wrongfully, without pity for that child.

11. O pearl—time was stingy with your like—
Lost, so every eye wept with tears.

12. Friends and languages grieved,
On the day of parting, from virtues and piety.

13. O you who, if the women of our country
Were considered a necklace, you’d be its precious pearl.

14. Time weeps for your youth, lamenting
A character imbued with its most delightful spirit.

15. We hoped to see your return,
That souls would live again through you, but fate preceded.

16. If you are absent from eyes, in fact
You are present fully in imagination.

17. O Ibn Qudamah, you have closed the eye of a generous one
Whose modesty and shame used to close it.

18. However much virtue you sought from her
You found all good game in its bounds.

19. Alas for the sun of morn, alas for
The full moon of dusk, alas for the branch of softness.

20. Alas for a body that earth has concealed,
Alas for the face crowned with beauty.

21. Alas for my grief which is of no use to me,
Grief I repeat though it last an age.

22. So weep not for me while I live, and if I die
Then let the greatest weeping for me be beneath the soil.