1. Oh my life, for how long
Will I drink bitterness and aloes from your hands?

2. How often do I die in you and live?
Where is the final fate that is destined for me?

3. Hand me over to death, for I
Find death from you more gentle and compassionate

4. And if living is humiliation and torture
Then death is more liberating and steadfast

5. My life is but a path of thorns
I walk on wounds and blood

6. As if I'm stepping on my heart over fire
And continuing despite the burning groans

7. I did not miss a funeral of life
Except to find thousands of funerals after it

8. And the life of hardship for the sensitive poet
Is more agonizing than Hell and darker

9. I am a poet, and what is poetry
Except my flutterings melting in song?

10. A poet who protected a teardrop and so sang
In the languages of tears, yearning poetry

11. The birds taught him their sad laments
So he sang with the birds and crooned

12. Oh poet of life, what
Have you gotten from it except shattered hopes?

13. You cry for every crying one
You are a heart divided among hearts

14. You have read life, lesson after lesson
And understood every hidden secret

15. Yet you saw that life only
Suits the slaves of ruin, humiliation and blood

16. Its goodness is for the wicked, not the inspired happy one
It is vain that it pleases the inspired one!

17. Is this life anything but
A hope in the breasts of despair, vague?

18. A deceit that makes the frowning laugh
Happily and makes the happy one tearful

19. Oh my life, what is my life, and what is the meaning
Of my existence in it, most miserable and dark?

20. Lord, have mercy, for it has pained me long
And the darkness on the path is mute and blind

21. I came to life against my will
And I will leave it to the grave by force

22. In it I am a traveller, my provisions are
Dreams, poetry, imagination and sculpture

23. And my drink is my fancy, and my sighs are my caravans
And my light is the blindness of the jet-black darkness

24. I have no share of the light of day
Except for the fingernail, a mere dirham

25. I wish I knew why, when I discard something
The desert and abyss stand between it and me

26. I have not found what I want, even sins
Are forbidden to me, even Hell!

27. Everything I aspire for I do not attain
If only I did not want and was not aware

28. I live with life but
My life of hopes is dead, shattered

29. If only life and I were dear friends
I would gain some profit from it in life