Shadi Kunaid Aye Dostan

Shadi Kunaid Aye Dostan — Be Joyful, O Friends — is unusual in Zahir's catalog in that it is a poem of release rather than longing. The speaker has crossed a threshold — 'Now free from bondage / A cry of joy sounds' — and addresses friends as if reporting a condition they will recognize and celebrate. This is not absence of feeling but arrival at a particular kind of peace, the contentment of having fully committed ('Now I have given away my heart') rather than the suffering of withheld love.

The address to the children of the roadway — 'O children of the roadway, I am at ease like you / Although I have walked the road of life longer than you' — introduces age and experience as context rather than burden. The speaker acknowledges a longer road walked without claiming wisdom the children lack. The children are simply at ease, and so is the speaker, and the shared condition matters more than the different distance covered.

The closing couplet — 'Play, O children — life is a game / I too have seen autumn, I too have seen spring' — is the poem's summary statement. 'Life is a game' in Persian poetry (bazi) is not nihilistic dismissal but an acknowledgment of life's cyclical, playful nature. The speaker has seen both autumn and spring, loss and flowering, and instructs the children to play without fear of autumn. In the context of Zahir's wider catalog of longing and absence, this poem reads as hard-won equanimity rather than naive cheerfulness.