Sol 5.6

  1. Your graying locks have admonished you,

    and so has the loss of your vanished youth.

  2. For seventy years you have watched the sun

    with your own eyes, rising and setting.

  3. Woe to you! Have you passed a single hour

    with your soul averse to a lapse?

  4. You have devoted yourself to making what cannot protect you,

    as though you were a toiling, weary soul.

  5. Your worldly life deceived you when she handed

    to you her false hopes.

  6. Did you suppose her a companion? Indeed she,

    with all her calamities, is a wretched companion.

  7. Has she not stripped from you youth's mantle?

    Can anything be reclaimed from the despoiler?

  8. Indeed, the minutes of her hours,

    by your life, are eating and drinking.

  9. And death, advancing from her quarter,

    is springing upon you with its claws.

  10. Have you not seen her, with death's pebble,

    pelting every dear friend of hers?

  11. It is as though your soul possessed a magnet

    with which it has taken to drawing sins.

  12. O you whose sin is forever present,

    while whose repentance is forever absent!

  13. Melt from within yourself a heart, and with it rival

    your streaming tears as they race,

  14. over every sin committed in youth,

    whose recording exhausted its scribe.

  15. Perhaps God will ward punishment away from you;

    otherwise, condemned indeed is the end.

Sol 5.6