Rasha Dar Dast Baghban

Rasha Dar Dast Baghban — A Trembling in the Gardener's Hand — is a song of seasonal end: autumn arriving, the gardener trembling, the young sapling shuddering. In Persian lyric the garden is not merely a place but the world of cultivated beauty — spring and the beloved, roses and love. Autumn's arrival in this garden is love's ending or political fear given natural form.

The nightingale's departure from the garden is the tradition's most codified image of love's separation: the nightingale loves the rose, lives for the rose, and when the rose is gone (or threatened) the nightingale must go too. 'Nightingales packed their things from the meadow / They broke the wings of their joy / Joy's door was closed upon them' — the packing is deliberate and sorrowful, not sudden flight. The wings of joy are broken before departure, which means the nightingales leave already diminished.

'One by one they separated from their nests / Wretched and sorrowful and helpless they became' — the plural nightingales make this a collective rather than individual poem. Many voices, many separations, one autumn. In the context of Afghanistan's late 1970s, this song of forced departure carried meanings its original garden setting could not contain: the nightingales separating from nests was also Kabuli families leaving for Pakistan, Iran, the West. Ahmad Zahir's recordings of such songs, made in the years before the catastrophe, took on dimensions of prophecy they were never meant to have.