Yade Rozogare Shirin

Yade Rozogare Shirin — Memory of Sweet Days — is a retrospective poem, a meditation on what was rather than a petition for what might return. The opening catalog — sweet days (rozogare shirin), old love (mehr-e gozashta), warm kisses, salty lips — is notable for its mixture of sweetness and salt, warmth and age. The kisses are warm but the lips are salty: salty in Persian poetry (shur) carries connotations of both taste and a kind of wry, unsentimental quality, as in salt that preserves or that stings. The memory is exact, not idealized.

'My head in your warm embrace, my lips on your soft lips / In the silence of midnight, with hope and longing' — the scene is specific: a midnight intimacy with the silence as witness. Hope and longing (omid o arzu) appearing together in this moment is unexpected — these are usually the emotions of absence, not presence. Their appearance during the remembered embrace suggests the speaker even then was aware of the fragility of the moment, longing for its continuation while still inside it.

The beloved's words — 'when spring comes, when flowers and hyacinths bloom again / Ask of me again — your ancient love' — constitute a promise that was either made and broken or made and kept but ended anyway. 'Ancient love' (mehr-e deerin) spoken by the beloved about the speaker's love gives the love a dignity of age even in the moment it was first postponed. Whether spring came and the asking happened, the poem does not say. The memory ends in the beloved's voice, and what follows is the silence of recall rather than the answer.