Yarab Ghame Be Rahmye Janan

Yarab Ghame Be Rahmye Janan — O God, to Whom Shall I Tell — is a complaint poem addressed directly to God (yarab, 'O my Lord') in the opening line, and then opens into the recurring question 'to whom shall I tell it?' (be ki goyam). This structure — an initial address to God as the only possible witness, followed by the impossibility of finding any adequate listener — is one of the oldest forms in Persian religious-lyric poetry, found in Rumi, in Hafiz, and in the marthiya (elegy) tradition.

The poem's central complaint is not only about the pain itself but about its incommunicability: 'They say, O physicians, tell your pain — but / Pain that has passed beyond remedy — to whom shall I tell it?' The physicians advise confession of pain as a diagnostic step toward cure. But the speaker's pain has surpassed the remedial — it cannot be told because telling it presupposes a remedy could follow. There is no appropriate listener for a pain that medicine cannot reach.

'The pain that has made me notorious — all know it / The wound that has burnt me in secret — to whom shall I tell it?' — the distinction between the public pain and the secret wound is the poem's sharpest observation. The notorious pain is known to everyone; the secret wound that burns from within is unknown to all. The social performance of suffering and the private experience of it are different, and only the private wound constitutes the question. Zahir sings this poem in the lineage of Hafiz's classical paradox: the mystic's greatest pain is the one that cannot be spoken without diminishing it.