Maham Ze Rah Raseed Wali

'The moon too arrived from the road, but left before arriving / Left without a word said and nothing heard' — the paradox of leaving before arriving is the poem's central image. It is not merely that the moon departed quickly; it departed so completely that the arrival itself is retrospectively erased. The moon in Persian poetry is almost always a figure for the beloved: face like the moon, the moon of beauty.

'I ran before her and she did not turn back / She departed like a tear falling to the hem' — daaman (hem) is where tears fall when someone bows their head in grief. To depart like a tear is to become involuntary, weightless, a thing that falls rather than walks. The speaker running ahead of her is futile; a tear cannot be stopped by something running in front of it.

'She came like a cloud of mercy and left like a flash of tumult / She came trailing her skirts and left pulling them away' — the contrast in how arrival and departure are clothed: mercy becomes tumult, the trailing garment pulled sharply back. The poem does not explain why she left. It only describes the quality of the leaving — arrival as gift, departure as withdrawal of that gift at the same moment.