1. You were placed between inhibitions and imagination
O wise soul, O son of greatness

2. You were placed in the East among downfallen people
Who did not awaken, and a lazy nation

3. They have humiliated you between companionship and a cup
And passion for a gazelle or a doe

4. And lineage and praise and satire
And elegy and sedition and misguidance

5. And zeal I see it in nothing
And pettiness that trails the hem of pretense

6. You have lived among them disgraced and lost
And so you were in past eras

7. They burdened you with sorrow from the love of Layla
And Sulayma and the ruins of encampments

8. And crying over a dear one who turned away
And customs that have been taken by the nights

9. And if one day they elevate your worth
They house you atop camels to settle

10. Now, O poetry, it is time to undo shackles
With which the advocates of the impossible have fettered us

11. So lift these veils from us
And let us smell the wind of the north