1. I offer my face to none but the likes of you, so generous
And my pride in other than your glory is diminished

2. O you who are generous, whose palm pours rainclouds
Upon every seeker made destitute

3. He to whom, if the excellent son of Yahya saw in his hand
Would come seeking his generosity

4. You have a Nile that has shamed the Nile in generosity
And made the Euphrates and Tigris seem paltry before it

5. My master Sa'd al-Din, the prayer of a servant
Whose paths to praise you are made smooth

6. By Him who has given you glory and extended
His shade over hearts with safety

7. Abandon me not to other than you, for I
Come to complain to you of much scarcity

8. God forbid that I should turn my face
From you, my sovereign, whose door is submission

9. My breast is narrowed by what I seek from fate
To attain wishes, yet it shows no haste

10. And for how long should I thus blame my days
Fretting fruitlessly, for the matter is God's

11. And to Abd al-Rahman I complain of days
Whose turns have killed me a thousand killings

12. My breast is narrowed by cares, and had I not
Been threatened by fate, it would not have dragged its hem

13. At times I wander destitute in Damietta, hoping
For sustenance from it, at times in Maḥallah

14. Among folk who have made refusal and
Denial their habit and tendency in this age

15. So provide for me without asking any vile person
Whose worth is low, be he highly placed

16. A group from whom I gained no return from my
Purpose in asking, save through shame

17. When I was absent from them, they blamed me
When I came to them, they saw that as tiresome

18. I am a disgrace among them, though others
Are lower than me, clothed and possessing mules

19. I have a thin garment that counts among my years
Decades - I have washed it a thousand washings

20. Ask me not the price at which I bought it. When
I pieced it together patchwork fashion with strips

21. The winds have flayed its breast, and the linings
Complain of blasts and humidity by night

22. The days have oppressed it unjustly, till it became
Amidst painful punishment without pause

23. Every day the afternoon and repeated mending
Assail it time and again, yet it has no rest with the strips

24. So it wears out each time I wash it
And the patchwork strips remove that washing

25. Where is my former life in it, and that folding
In it, and my pride, and joined seams

26. When its sides were matched by a patch
With neither slit nor slit-seam in its sleeves

27. The people said to me when I was overlong preoccupied with it
“Enough! You have teased it overmuch so it has faded”