1. You hurried, O gray hair, to my temple
What excuse do you have to hurry so?

2. How did you set upon a transient
That had not overwhelmed poetry or reached perfection?

3. I used to see twenty as a paradise for me
When the raider of gray hair came

4. Now the sons of the mother of youth are equal
And he whose life was longer

5. O visitor who came and went
And transient who had not dimmed before it faded

6. Those who saw had not before it
Seen crops wither before they ripened

7. If only the whiteness had come to me last
Instead of the whiteness that was my first

8. If only the dawn whose light saddened me
Had faded and left its lengthy night

9. O fading one who boasted vainly
It is time for the fading one to be plucked

10. It crowned my head with white spikes
As if it crowned it with a sickle

11. This while I was not old in my youth
So what of one who surpassed or went deeper?

12. Out of fear it would be wasted on my face
I was stingy to walk about at night

13. If only I had worn it out
Seeking glory and reaching the heights

14. They said "Leave the sitter whom"
"The night walker and wanderer ridicules"

15. My poetry would sometimes claim
To have descended on me before it descended

16. Now its whiteness protects me
From lying words and nullifying them

17. Say to my critic today, "Sleep silent
For gray hair relieves me from having to apologize"

18. I have accepted it in myself, and he who found
Only demise resigned and turned to it

19. It found no other refuge but me
And I found no haven but it