You do not Want Me? - Gahuan-Beyg

You do not want me, Zohrah.

Is it because I am maimed?

Yet Tamour-leng was maimed,

Going on crippled feet,

And he conquered the vast of the world.

You do not want me, Zohrah.

Is it because I am maimed?

Yet I have one arm to fight for you,

One arm to crush you to my rough breast,

One arm to break men for you.

It was to shield you from the Khargis

That I drag this stump in the long days.

It has been so with my women;

They would have made you a toy for heat.

After their chief with his axe once swinging

Cut my left arm, that, severed, bloody, and dead,

Yet struggled on the ground trying to guard you,

I have had pain for long in my arm that's lost.

Since the silk nets of your grape-lustrous eyes

Ensnared this heart that did not try to guard,

Ever I have a great pain in my heart that's lost.

You do not want me, Zohrah.

---

Chief Gahuan-Beyg (1850-1885) Kazakhstan

Translated by E. Powys Mathers

Source: The Garden of Bright Waters One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems Translated by Edward Powys Mathers, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1920

Note: Tamour-leng = Tamerlane (1336 – 1405), who founded the Timurid Empire in and around modern-day Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia