ليت شعري ماذا يفيد البيان

Would that my knowledge knew what eloquence avails, when bellies are hollow and clear expression fails.

And the arts of rhetoric without a bite to eat, set both the tongue and the palate all ablaze with heat.

Here take a thousand metaphors for just a single loaf, and meager chicory where you conjugate and scoff.

O grammarians arise, for Zayd striking Amr never yet weighed down a platter with a feast.

Where, oh where are the roast meat and rice and bulgur wheat, whose overflowing mounds once made the platters sweet?

The golden age of cooking has departed and given way, to an epoch of sheer hunger led by Lebanon today.

What a lasting shame it is that we let our religion slip away, yet no one cares for the weeds that hold sway.

Neither buying nor selling remains in a land, where life has withered and only darnel takes command.

My stay in the monastery has dragged on so long, I am like a monk whom the brethren find all wrong.

When they saw me surrounded by books and pens—things strictly forbidden by the bishop's decrees.

I sit in utter desolation, entirely by myself, where no familiar face or passing woman crosses the shelf.

An existence so grim that if shown in a dream, no melody afterward could ever redeem.