Ze Jane Man Che Maikhahi

Ze Jane Man Che Maikhahi — What Do You Want From My Soul? — opens with the demand of an accounting from the absent beloved. 'What do you want from my soul?' asks what the beloved is extracting or requiring, and immediately answers itself: 'You left — without you I died.' The beloved has already left; what remains of the speaker is a kind of posthumous voice, addressing someone who is no longer present. 'O covenant-breaker' (ay ahd-shikan) names the beloved's offense precisely: not mere faithlessness but the breaking of a specific covenant, a promise that was made and violated.

'I was faithful to you for a lifetime — alas, you were faithless / How many nights I spent without you — where were you those nights?' — the bookkeeping of a long relationship: years of faithfulness on one side, faithlessness on the other. The question 'Where were you those nights?' is the poem's emotional center, the question that cannot be answered and whose unanswrability is itself the proof of the faithlessness.

'In whose embrace did you spend your time — who was your companion then / When until the whitening of dawn my eyes waited at the door?' — 'until the whitening of dawn' (ta sepeda-dam) is the same dawn-as-enemy image found elsewhere in Zahir's catalog, but here the enemy is time itself: the speaker waited through the entire night, and the dawn came without the beloved. The final line — 'You took my heart and left — go, you are not lacking a lover' — is Zahir's most bitter dismissal. The last phrase ('you are not lacking a lover,' i.e., others will love you) releases the beloved from any obligation to return. It is a release and a renunciation in one, the speaker's pride reasserting itself at the poem's end.