Wafa Agar Ze Kas Benam

Wafa Agar Ze Kas Benam — If I See Faithfulness from Anyone — is a two-stanza poem of radical inversion. The opening line is among the strangest in Zahir's catalog: 'If I see faithfulness from anyone, I become estranged from myself.' This is the opposite of what is expected — faithfulness should bring the speaker closer to themselves, not estrange them. The implication is that the speaker has adapted so thoroughly to betrayal and absence that faithfulness from anyone — including perhaps themselves — becomes an alienating condition.

The central image is the deliberate reversal of the moth-candle trope: 'I am that candle that circles around the head of the moth.' In classical Persian poetry, the moth (parvana) circles the candle (sham) and burns in it — the moth is the devoted lover, the candle the burning beloved who destroys without noticing. Here, Zahir's speaker is the candle who circles the moth. The inversion is not random: it makes the speaker the dangerous, consuming force pursuing the fragile, vulnerable beloved. This is simultaneously a confession of the speaker's destructive power and a recognition that the roles of pursuer and consumed are not fixed.

'Why do you pour my tears in longing for one kiss? / For I circle around your lips like a drunken smile' — the drunken smile (labkhande-e mast) is an image of involuntary, helpless expression. The speaker circles the beloved's lips the way a drunken person circles something they cannot stop returning to — not with intention but with the compulsion of intoxication. Together the two stanzas describe a speaker who is estranged by faithfulness, who pursues despite being the destructive force, and who circles involuntarily. The poem is a portrait of a love that has reversed all conventional expectations.