1. If you are a monk, then be a wailer
And increase your weeping and leave jesting aside

2. For the joy of the repentant on earth is lament
Indeed, wailing suppresses joys

3. O emotions of the eyes, be profuse in pouring down
O tears of humility, increase your gushing

4. Perhaps you will shake the heart of a sinner
Who transgressed the law and made the forbidden permissible

5. Every day that passes without lament
Your soul has lost profits

6. O may God have mercy on a monk who shed tears
As blood for sins, wailing

7. The trait of the pious monk is weeping
And wailing that embraces hardships

8. Whoever wants to stand bearing the burden of attire
That fills the horizons and regions with lament

9. The wailers have not seen a feast on earth
Neither pleasure with it, nor comfort

10. Nor do they desire a pleasant life
Nor do they drink wine and find rest

11. There is a great distance between weeping and a companion saying
“O friend, pour me overflowing cups”

12. Their food is dry bread in the evening
I have left that evening with me as morning

13. Every day their abode is desolate wilderness
A shelter they have never seen breezy

14. For sustaining life is food and drink
So I have left them bodiless ghosts

15. They shed their skin with harsh discipline
They disciplined it, leaving it wounded

16. Passion in nature has a burning wick
Kindling it with fornication, even ardently

17. And if wine flows over it
It comes closer to corruption when sparked

18. O lament, tell us where do you lodge
And inform us of the guarded secret, so it is revealed

19. Staying up at night, praying and keeping
The interior empty of them I do not like tranquility

20. And my lodging is humility of heart, I
Will find no comfort except through humility

21. Silence is a door and lock for me
As opening frivolity has a key for it

22. If you are a jester, beware of my fleeing
How much jesting has lament fled from

23. One accustomed to jesting resides in sin
Oh would that God make a jesting monk remorseful

24. He imagined the time of prayer an inanimate being
And illusions a chirping sparrow

25. Laughter is but a wing for lament
Oh a wing that has become a wing for me

26. And I have notes explaining lament
Whose core is silence, unable to relax

27. O brother of fasting and prayers in wakefulness
Clarify them for us and increase elucidation

28. And let us know what removes you from us
And remnants of decline in us, so state it aloud

29. My illness is indulgence and luxury, my death
Is that my death destroys souls

30. Every devotion without lament and eulogy
Does not equal virtue and righteousness

31. For the soul has fervor and ardency
And nothing but lament restrains ardency

32. The seal of advice is my deficient chest’s return
To the start - if you are a monk, then be a wailer