Ein Shero Ra Baraye Tu

Ein Shero Ra Baraye Tu — This Poem I Say for You — is an unusually immediate song: the poem announces itself as a poem, addressed to a specific person on a specific occasion (a thirsty summer evening). The summer evening (shab-e garma-ye teshna) is a felt temperature, a specific Afghan experience of dry heat and longing. The poem is being given as a gift inside the conditions that produced it.

'Let my shadow, wandering, be far and separate from your shadow / One day we will meet — if it is meant to be / With no one between us, no one but God' — the separation is desired in order to make the eventual meeting cleaner. Two wandering shadows have become entangled; the speaker wishes them to separate so that any future union is direct and unmediated. 'No one between us but God' frames the reunion as something that will happen in the sacred space between two souls, witnessed only by the divine.

'With this group of outwardly righteous hypocrites / I know this battle is not easy' — a political-social dimension enters. The 'outwardly righteous' (zahiran-e reya) are those who perform religious respectability while acting otherwise — a critique familiar from Persian Sufi poetry as well as from Afghan social observation. 'The city of me and you has long been the home of the devil' — the corruption is structural and old. The poem is given in full awareness of the environment it is being given in.