This is the age of dead morality:
Wrong-doers from the decent turn and flee;
Once more the base1 despising noble blood,
insinuate, and ape, nobility.

Their prayers no longer bother to beseech
Their God, now that mullahs no long preach.
Even the Kazi, long the Prophet's voice -
The Kazi holds his hand out for bakhshish.

Sultans now laugh at justice in eclipse.
These derelictions spell apocalypse,
When farthings buy a mufti's best decree,
And tyrants die with no prayer on their lips.

The poor are pallid, starving, and distraught,
While bulging bellies mark another sort -
Those vile oppressors beating the oppressed,
Whose whippings form a bloody kind of sport.

Nobody listens when a scholar sings.
To the Creator no one tribute brings.
Sufis no longer read the Holy Book,
Forswear religion for more worldly things.

Too many Sufis are that but in name,
Eating the food of tyrants without shame,
Hoping Lord So-and -So will call them good,
Haunting the scented thresholds of ill-fame.

Young people, once so fair, are now turned grey,
Backs turn to humps and hands to feet of clay.
Brothers meanwhile pile baggage on their heads,
Shuffling along towards the Judgement Day.

A wise man, feeling heart and senses smother,
Seeks remedies for all the pained world's bother.
-Declaring sin has sullied everything,
He thinks to slip from this world to another.

Now is the day of dissipated lords.
The tongues of gossips wag like those of bawds.
So who remains to seek a finer goal
When love itself grows dim, without rewards?

This sugared Kazi speaks with double tongue,
No longer spending nights his books among,
Or following the right path for shadah.
The world of faith he trades for passion's dung.

Says Makhtumkuli, "Find your path and learn
God gives you only five days to discern
The truth. Where are the souls already fled?
Each one of us must follow in our turn."