1. What did you gain from all the journeys and hardships,
And spending your life between pillow and blanket?

2. We see you seeking neither ease nor abundance,
With no money or possessions to your name.

3. Do not let the jaws of blame bite me
For this failure, I descend from wonder.

4. I wish they had cast me out the day I came to them
In the whale's prayer niche or the lion's den.

5. Perhaps what I endure would have appeased my wisher
And he would have wished to hasten us from this world of thorns.

6. I squandered a youth I should have spent
And a resolve the world made white but did not dye.

7. How often I worried in the desert and the ruins slept
While the sun flung the earth's skin with flames.

8. And how often I wore the night's gown when the dust slept
While the night was calmer than my sighing beside the fires.

9. The stars wonder at my affair and think me
Beside thePleiades, an eighth to the seven planets.

10. But I am not auspicious, and the hand of fate
Keeps pushing me away from success.

11. I have risen while my hopes lie discarded
And in my affairs, confusion reigns supreme.

12. If my lineage to the East prevents me
From the Turks' and Arabs' glory, alas!

13. It used to be when they were provoked
The West donned a robe of monasticism.

14. And their ember in the East did not die out
Nor did the ashes of decadence and falsehood extinguish it.

15. When will I see the Nile, its channels not sweetened
By anyone but those hoping in God and fearing Him?

16. Egypt has reached a state that when mentioned
My eyelids overflow for it with moist pearls

17. As if when I remember what befell it
I am a hyena, wavering between death and flight.

18. When the prison bubbles, I lean
And when silent, still my soul is not content.

19. Does absence make us complain of poverty, going and coming
While we walk on land made of gold?

20. The people in Egypt are like a sponge that soaked up
The water, leaving no teat for the milker.

21. O house of Osman, what is this estrangement from us
When in God we are brothers and in scriptures?

22. You left us to people contrary to us
In religion, merit, morals and manners.