Lalaye Daghdida

The tulip in Persian poetry is a grief-bearer. Its red petals carry the color of blood and the shape of a cup — the wine cup of sacrifice. The lala-e-daghdida, the grief-marked tulip, is the flower that wears the wound of love on its face. It is a more troubled figure than the rose: where the rose is the beautiful indifferent beloved, the tulip is the lover scarred by encounter with that beauty.

'I resemble a crop struck by blight' — the agricultural image grounds the poem's abstractions. Blight is what happens to something growing that is stopped from growing; it is not dramatic destruction but gradual, spreading ruin.

The line 'The heart is not a dove that once it rises it alights again / From the corner of the roof that we flew from — we flew, we flew' is among the most structurally precise images in this song. A dove can be coaxed back to its roost; the heart, once it has truly departed, cannot be retrieved. 'We flew' repeated — the act of leaving stated twice, as if to confirm it is not metaphor.