Raftam Mara Bebakhsh

Raftam Mara Bebakhsh inverts the standard position of the departure poem. Usually it is the beloved who leaves; here the speaker is the one who has gone, and he is asking not to be blamed for it. 'Do not say he had no faithfulness' — the first concern is reputation, the perception of faithlessness, which he is already trying to prevent.

The explanation is notable: he left not because he stopped loving but because the love had taken him somewhere dangerous. 'This fiery love full of hopeless pain / Had dragged me into the valley of ruin and madness.' The valley of ruin (wadi-e wirani) is a specific classical Persian topography: the desolate terrain where the lover is consumed by the love that drives them there, stranded between longing and impossibility.

'I fled from two bright weeping eyes / I fled from the wild laughter of the storm' — the paired images are deliberately contradictory. The weeping eyes invoke tenderness and guilt; the storm's laughter invokes chaos and threat. He is fleeing both the thing that makes him want to stay and the thing that makes staying impossible.