1. If you're ever a challenger, come out
Nothing but death holds one back

2. Come dress me in the robes
Of interwoven daggers, crimson

3. This lad accompanying me is my brother
The Rāfiqīs, their affair is a miracle

4. Their cubs are lions in their prime
When they're weaned, their chicks hawks

5. So travel to him a necklace that makes a land happy
Don't you see he's angry and provoked?

6. Who's Jullanar and Anūshirwān? Who's
Shāhpuhr? Who's Hormuz?

7. This is death when it's concise in
Grasping all souls, or more concise

8. Who other than He made mountains collide
And made their pillars quake and shake?

9. Who in the seas of torment is kneaded
Since he was, and who in its blaze is baked?

10. The stroke of a sword when it strikes him
On his face is the stab of a needle stabbed

11. A lad, when he passed, passed wearing
A coat of mail interwoven with evil

12. The weight of iron has sunk into a body
From which, by the whip's blow, blood oozed

13. A prisoner, if he called a dove to fight
The dove would fear to come out

14. O you whose command in prisons is allowed
As the prince's command is allowed, or more

15. Hub of the millstone of death, you brought out
Death, and that death, they say, brought out

16. By the right of the one who attained gallantry
Or who attained it through one who attained

17. A freedman, lethal with his dagger
Or a chained man, his chains squeezing

18. Assailant, all whom his knife assails
From its sheath it jumps to assail

19. Your status, so see what I have met
And what he has met from this solicitor

20. A solicitor claims damages from me, so how
I'm blamed because of him and squeezed

21. He wasted himself on me, don't you see
With what healing the damages are patched?

22. O lion, you own the affair
So go and disperse it if you wish, or keep it

23. You're not my slave, so whichever peg
You wanted to jump on, go ahead and jump

24. Come sell in Aleppo
If you complain of stagnation in Kiliz

25. You reckon passion in its state
Flew off. The locusts of passion didn't alight.

26. O you Christians, when a lion abstracted
He's Jacob's son, that scabies-covered one

27. As for your bishop and patriarch
Among those from whom it abstracted like one abstracted

28. Sheep for slaughter, the sacrificial altars filled
Made for slaughter, then squeezed

29. More adder-like than a hedgehog and more billy-goat-like than a goat, so shame on the adder-like billy goat
As if a black-haired female goat donated her outfit to him

30. He's an expert in shearing, so if his years are reckoned
He's mature, but then didn't twist

31. His forehead is his shield. His brains
Are focused on piercing flesh with a spear embedded in his shield.

32. Ask about the corridors and trenches—how many
A trench in his lifetime and how many corridors?

33. How many slaughterhouses have you seen their destruction in?
And how many kitchens and bakeries?

34. Defective but raised on him, so how much
He's patched up, my brothers, and how much squeezed!

35. I have not seen his like, so how can I see
A treasure of an heir lodged inside him?

36. When he descends to the rug sprawled out
He measures himself from paunch to paunch

37. His touch is like a boulder's surface
Pelted above with smooth pebbles

38. If an elephant stomped on him a year
It wouldn't sense the elephant stomping

39. God isn't incapable—just the opinion of my father
Uthman about him. His opinion is the most incapable.

40. What's wrong with him? He sold a blessing for misery.
Doesn't he know how? And he didn't distinguish.

41. Marwan's son slipped in a way that disgraced
So the secret's symbol in him was exposed by one who encoded secrets.

42. So where is that well-bucket made of palm fronds
Cured of its illness? It protruded.

43. And he recovered until it was as if he
When gone didn't survive on broth and fodder.

44. When you hear his pronunciation
You hear in the Bedouin a pompous braggart

45. He refers to bread as millet, just as
One refers to the name of melon as gourd.

46. To him, all flowers are basil,
Wormwood, and all of them common.

47. His neighbor is a boulder on Uhud
But even boulders are squeezed while he is not squeezed

48. So I wonder who engraved the thumb
Of this lad who engraved?

49. My pact with him was the sorrowful angel. O life
Why did you transform him and twist him?

50. He was excessive in our matter which he was excessive in
The ignorant one doesn't know the one who makes him

51. Out to be the son of al-Dimashqi—what an evil thing he claimed!
O you who in the morning directed

52. The matter of Sa'id with evil when you directed
You came at a time tearing up what

53. He patched up in his life and tailored