Ta Labash Dar Nazaram

Ta Labash Dar Nazaram — As Long As Her Lips Pass Before My Sight — is a meditation on passage, impermanence, and the inability to hold anything still. The poem uses the verb 'to pass' (guzashtan) as its structural spine — lips pass, melting passes, things gaze at pass, lifetime passes, what comes upon the head passes. The repetition builds into a formal insistence: this is not incidental passing but the fundamental condition of existence at this crossing (sar-e in rah, at this juncture/road).

'At this crossing — to what shall I bind my heart? / Everything I gaze at, passes' is the philosophical center. The crossing (sar-e rah) is both a literal road intersection and a metaphysical juncture — a point where multiple paths converge and nothing stays. The inability to bind the heart (del bastan) to anything is a consequence not of the speaker's fickleness but of the nature of all available objects: they all pass. The question is rhetorical; there is no answer given because no answer exists.

'The figure made a ring and I did not become intimate / My lifetime passes at the outside of the door' — the figure (surat) that made a ring, a gathering circle, and excluded the speaker is the most concrete image in an otherwise abstract poem. The speaker stands outside a circle their entire life. The submission in the final couplet — 'I am submitted to the road that goes underfoot / Whatever comes upon my head — passes' — is not resignation but a kind of surrender to the movement itself. Zahir gives the poem an almost Buddhist rhythm, each 'passes' landing like a drumbeat in the meter.