Manande Man Fesorda Dile

'May there be no heart as broken as mine in the world / May no one ever be in my powerless state' — the poem is built on inverted prayers. Instead of praying for their own relief, the speaker prays that others escape the condition they inhabit. This is a form of complaint that wears generosity as its outer garment: I am past saving, but let me at least prevent others from being saved into the same ruin.

'Though autumn took my spring from your distance — what of it / O flower, may the spring of your youth never turn to autumn' — the speaker's own spring (jawani, youth and vitality) has been taken by the autumn of separation, but the beloved's spring is wished to endure. The contrast is asymmetric and deliberate. 'A hundred pains I have seen from my own kind heart / O God, may there never be another kind heart in the world' — kindness as a liability, the tender heart as the organ most damaged by the world.

'Whoever leaves leaves a trace of themselves / May nothing remain of me but the tale of your love' — the final wish is for the obliteration of self, leaving only a love story as residue. In Sufi vocabulary this is fana: the dissolution of the ego. What remains is not the speaker but the story of a devotion — which means survival only in relation to the beloved.