Sol 5.6

  1. My love is true, unmarred by flaws,

    yet for all my boundless love, my fortune falls short.

  2. Even if one who offered me counsel sought to reproach me,

    I would turn my reproacher back, disgraced and retreating.

  3. I fell for him—a Turk in lineage and in the cast of his eyes,

    of pure descent from the house of the Khagan.

  4. He grew up a gazelle among lions and gazelles,

    hard of heart, wild by nature, ever elusive.

  5. I had known the gazelles of the wilderness to be hunted,

    but this is a gazelle who hunts the lions.

  6. Rare beauties are adorned by his qualities,

    while anyone but my beloved is adorned by such beauties.

  7. His is a veiled beauty, forever guarded

    by a watchman whom fate keeps intent on preserving it.

  8. There can be no union save by stealing a glance—

    the beholder’s eye fixed upon him whenever he appears.

  9. And here he is, absent from my sight for a month;

    and here am I today, searching out my death.

  10. My heart abides in a fire of longing,

    and my eye dives into a sea of tears.

Sol 5.6