Chon Darakht Farwardin

Chon Darakht Farwardin — Like a Spring Tree in Full Blossom — is a rare upswing in Zahir's catalog: a song of abundance rather than deprivation. The speaker's soul is a spring tree, full of blossoms, carrying a lapful of flowers. The question 'on whom shall I scatter them?' is the problem of too much: not insufficiency but surplus, looking for a worthy recipient of all this accumulated beauty.

The middle stanzas sustain the sensory register: silk moonlight in the silence of nights, a mountain firmly rooted. The beloved is invited to lay their head in the speaker's lap — the nurturing role reversed, the usually suppliant speaker now offering shelter and firmness. 'Soul-nourishing breeze' (saba-ye jan-parwar) is the mediating element — if it does not pass by tonight, the flower-laden soul will not last until dawn.

The final couplet delivers the song's quiet contradiction: 'No one in the wine-drinkers' gathering knows my state / Because with a blood-full heart, like a cup, I am laughing.' The blood-full heart laughing from inside a cup is a Persian image of hidden grief performing public pleasure. The spring tree is showing all its blossoms; the heart inside is full of blood. Both are true. Zahir performs this contradiction with a lightness that holds both states at once.