1. The scoundrels reproach you while the pillow is your only support,
Your hands are your limit every night,

2. Until you see the face of dawn as a pillow.
As if, when yearning creeps upon you,

3. Chains are drawn tight upon your face.
You spend the night wakeful, hoping for its passing,

4. Yet for lovers' nights there is no end.
You toss and turn in a darkness as though

5. Its blackness is connected to you, blackness.
Weariness has refused to close its tired eyes

6. To sleep, intent and heart are wakeful.
The struggle of the soul in what it pursued

7. And your comprehension of the stubborn soul a struggle.
The great distance from a goal, if you travelled it

8. To your love's estrangement, separation would not take you far.
Yet my mind, gathering after gathering, counsels you

9. Against what would not bring you ruin.
Will you not now heal yourself, find solace,

10. Since she is lost to you and your heart distraught?
I see the soul has been miserly toward you in attaining it

11. And miserly toward itself in happy fortune.
What is it to you if that does not give you respite?

12. What is it of you if that does not bring you rest?
A gazelle enticed me and I desired to hunt it,

13. Yet had I not so desired, I'd not have hunted.
When the breeze of love lifts from you its care,

14. New love will divert it.
It has been candid about what a taunt whispers,

15. You are wounded until you have become an echo.
Passions have pressed upon you, so you weep more,

16. And for tears, the beloved is their ink.
Say to a friend who thinks ill, good counsel,

17. And in some of the loved one's precincts, guidance.
He delays what would give you comfort,

18. So you live - all of it harshness.
If I say, "I have met with misfortune

19. In your love," she says, "And more will yet come."
For us are hardness, gentle words,

20. The agony of estrangement, bitterness and affection.
By God, I know not, though each is a tribulation,

21. By what wiles of women we are undone.
A gazelle enticed me and I desired to hunt it,

22. Yet had I not so desired, I'd not have hunted.
The fair faced - his share of you is kinship

23. While your share of him agony and ardour.
When you find comfort in the imminent separation

24. Hoping for mankind's sister when she is gone,
Deceitful promises are like her visitations

25. As if her coming were shooting stars.
You have never been favoured by fate and beyond it

26. To the mother of calamity, beginning and return.
Will you not, if fate does not give you its head,

27. Humble it until you see it led?
Else leave off your youth and healing is

28. In the wake of she you love, while in you is ink.