Your Life

Poem by Abū al-ʻAtāhiyya (748–828), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 59: Your life is a sum of counted breaths. With each breath that passes a part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer, and your caravan is led by one who will not jest with you.