1. Alone beyond despair and sorrow
Affliction drags me from affliction to affliction

2. And the childlike innocence of the artist... amazes me
Distracting me from the weight of my pain and my weakness

3. For I am a child without youth
And despair is my wet nurse and embracer

4. And the hostility of villains tires me
And the veins wash with misery

5. And their corpses stink here and there
Like the wind in a rotten swamp

6. And they disappear from my path... and their eyes
In the path, forests of sorrows

7. And my enemies are dwarves... they are scared
Of my alertness and frightened of my resolve

8. What are they scared of me for? And neither
My secrets nor my public self are associated with malice

9. They fear because evil is their profession
And I am without evil, without a profession

10. And because I know their shortcomings
And because they betrayed while I did not cheat

11. And because they sold their Arabism
And I transcended the sale and the price

12. And I was content to be miserable and make them happy
The fervor of villains and the ornament of rot

13. I live like an autumn bird without
Feathers, without a nest, without art

14. I nourish my pains and compose them
And build my dwelling from their echoes

15. And I come like a wandering ghost without
A past, without a future, beyond time

16. And without a homeland: who believes me?
That I am here a soul without a body

17. Who believes that I have a homeland
Whose eyes burned from me but did not see me?

18. And here I suckled its stars
As my pillow and its night harbored my yearning

19. Do I live in it and above its soil
Like a corpse discarded without a shroud?

20. And its slopes gave birth to me, a river
And green torches on the hills

21. What? Do my brothers and father know
That I am a Yemeni without Yemen?

22. Is there a homeland for me here or there?
No, no: my wounds alone are my homeland