Egypt, we left you in the nightfrost
where winter stormed your shaky frame
and Heaven learned to weep.
I see in your face
the longing for shelter,
how you smile despite the scars,
and the sun seeps up through night.
Behind lashes, the ruin of tears.
For now, pride and revolution
hold back more.

Driven by the cold, lines of exiles
settle in emptiness. In this stingey age,
the young who covet crusts of bread
left for poverty long ago.
Your blood is lost among the cracked skulls
of women and elders, lost
in ******’ perfume,
lost in a glass of wine.
The Arab nation can’t blame us
for being sick of the drums of brotherhood.

Beloved invalid, what happened to beauty?
Where are the colorful clothes,
and the perfume that filled all creation?
We fleeced it all, even vows and modesty,
left you jilted in the pit of our ignorance.

O holy land that still and forever summons hope for the pilgrim
O rose through which we embrace grief
O love that we adore in purity as well as sin

When we are discarded by darkness,
you are the one whose mouth is bright.
Don’t abandon your perfume.
Tomorrow the sky alive again with your scent
and I will feel your body rise once more.

Come to us, beloved,
in the tattered age of strays.
Come for us, inner haven,  
in a time of tyrants.
I got used to crying as soon as I started.
Now I can’t stop.
While a glass shatters, grief persists
and purity is a rarity,
but your beauty beams and hums,
like autumn blazing on through winter winds.

We faithful children witness springs flowing through frost,
the scent of yearning, and the perfume of blood.
Your people, Egypt, arc and seam the generations,
so don’t ask anyone else for reconstruction,
don’t cry over what you have given,
and don’t look back in grief.
Be mouth and eye and voice as you always have
since the earth’s first secret,
and forgive us, O temple of the soul, O black
delta soil, forgive us for God’s sake.