You sought deliverance from it, yet you could devise no stratagem and found no escape.
So you paid with your very life—life of which you had always been so miserly; whoever will not yield it willingly will have it taken.
Never have we heard of a death like yours at the moment you died, nor of a plight as wretched as your own.
You lived grasping, driven on by greed, and you died at the hand of a slayer for whom no retaliation can be claimed.
O you whose downfall was lured by the taste of tender squabs—woe to you! Could you not have been content with the ghudad (mere scraps of flesh)?
Did you not fear the ambush of Time when you yourself leapt into the dovecote with a lion’s spring?
The consequence of wrongdoing (1) never sleeps, even though it be delayed for many a span.
You wanted to devour the nestlings while Time would not devour you with the devouring of an oppressor (2)—
a notion far removed from sound reason; how rare its like, whether near or far!
May Allah place no blessing in food when the destruction of lives lies in the belly that consumes it.
How often has a single morsel entered a glutton’s gut, only to drive his very soul from his body!
You had no need to scale the dovecote—even had it been the Garden of Eternity.
You were living in bounty and tranquil ease, granted by the Almighty, the All-Dominant, the Self-Sufficient.
You feasted freely on the mice in our house, an unmeasured, ever-increasing fare beyond all count (3).
For a long time you had scattered their ranks, yet after that dispersal they gathered once more.
They left us neither coarse nor fine within the recesses of our rooms;
they emptied their depths, leaving nothing that a hand had hung upon a peg.
They crumbled the bread in the baskets—how many a heart has crumbled for the children!
They tore new pieces from our clothes, so that every one of us now faces fresh calamities.