When you were sleeping at home, I came and died; when you awoke, I was at the poorhouse gate.

This couplet is a profound meditation on the suddenness and inevitability of death. Mir Taqi Mir asks a haunting question: When were you sleeping that you came home and died? The second line, 'when did the lock of the poor house wake up?' suggests that death isn't a private affair; it's a public, unavoidable event. It implies that fate, or the circumstances of life, are constantly watchful, waiting for the moment to claim us.