Bada Ha Khalist

'The wine cups are empty, empty — where is the goblet and the flask? / The tavern door is shut — where is the beautiful cupbearer?' — the poem opens on a tavern that should be operating but is not. The cups are empty, the door is shut, the cupbearer absent. Everything required for the gathering is missing; even the instruments of consolation have failed to arrive.

'I who have lost my way in the desert of madness — O sages / Where is the calm road of the world's felicities?' — the 'sages' (aqilan) are addressed as those who might know the calm road, but the question has no expectation of an answer. The sages are invoked as a contrast class — those who have stayed on the calm road — by someone who has entirely lost it.

'The stars are sleeping side by side in the heavens / Where, in the end, have those winks and those flickerings gone?' — the final image is the sharpest in the poem. The stars, which in Persian poetry are often associated with watchfulness or the beloved's eyes, are sleeping. The characteristic winks (charagh-zadan, flickering) that might signal or guide are gone. The world has gone dark and inward while the speaker remains awake and lost.