1. Is there hope for youth once passed,
Or but weeping of the wretched elder?

2. Naught but delusions, he who never ceases
To hasten himself to destruction.

3. I replaced white hair grown long in my locks,
After fine youth that brought joy.

4. I kept his company, but then we parted.
Would that my youth had not fled!

5. And yet it showed me as its counterpart,
Though I was neither bald nor humpbacked.

6. Nor had white clad me in its garments,
Dyeing the eyes of the whites like pupils.

7. As though my day a cycle, when
I shared no frivolity or play.

8. A pale morning coffee I hurried through
In gloom, while the cock had not yet crowed.

9. And longing head, blindly outstretched,
Goes foolishly wherever it will go.

10. I routed him when he overstepped
His limit, smiting his poll like a whelp’s.

11. And a night foray I undertook against him
With a swimmer, hot and inflamed.

12. You see him afterwards best the horseman
When he who was weak overturned like a beetle.

13. And a comrade I woke suddenly,
No winged creature, no locust was he.

14. A clown, rough his garb,
Like a chisel that rides what it rides.

15. He arose and his tusks to his saddlecloth,
Ragged and tattered and patchworked.

16. And a howdah like a porcupine uplifted,
While the sun had nearly set, but not set.

17. The wind wraps me about his head,
As though I were a hawk on a crag.

18. That, while my friend's meadows teem with dew,
Their greenery mantled and luxuriant.

19. The wasteland his horses' hooves made it seem
As though its blossoms were veiled in colocynth.

20. The heavens bestowed on his meadows
Stars and blossoms and Scorpio's sting.

21. As though the voices of its small birds
Were children's cries at play.

22.
I led him, mounted on an unsaddled Dhamiya,

23. Pied, brindled, dappled, and piebald.
Alone, his bellowing gladdened me,