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Chapter 4-E

Nimâ depicts himself as a savior riding his horse and having the rooster and the red star on his side:

The light came and the world's eye turned beautiful

Nimâ mounted his horse

The rooster bid his sleep adieu and woke up

Rise up, let us go, for Rojâ has appeared.

The day of salvation is unavoidable:

The day returns and shows himself again

The red star is shining more, watching the night

The moment that I remember him

I speak of Roja and words give birth to words.

Nimâ is at home in Rojâ. He talks in detail about his personal feelings in detail and does not get drawn into impersonal metaphors and situations. Many times, he addresses himself with the name Nimâ:

Friends, my love is not a good companion for me

My boat does not go straight in the whirlpool

Why is Nimâ not in control of his life

Whatever he does, he cannot get hold of himself.

He adds,

Get up, Nimâ, the caravan is taking off

Over the top of Mount Nâzar the sky is turning red

The water bucket is making a sound, the rooster is crowing

When the night is over, who knows his own good and evil?

He laments for his father:

Where are you my father to see my life

It is like an autumn which comes after a spring

The brave lion is surrounded by jackals

Where are you my father when I cry out “mother, mother”?

And, he laments for himself:

In the evening, when the calf was being given to his mother,

My father said, “Look how slow Nimâ is.”

I come and however so much I look at the mountains in back and in front

I can't see my runaway friend.

In the following poem, note the contrast between the woodcutter's ability to do his own work and Nimâ's inability to resolve his own thoughts:

Ramazân is by me chopping wood 

His talking is waking me from my sleep

My mind is a load on the world

It is riding on the very heavens.

The personal elements in Rojâ even include this elegy for his dog:

Dâlen, Dâlen, where are you Dâlen, my companion?

He says, my time has come and has taken me away

I say, the time has brought grief for me

Dâlen, Dâlen, where are you Dâlen, my companion?

Nimâ probably wrote this poem before he had a child:

I am an old fog, I do not want to rain

I want wheat, but I don't want to sow

Nimâ says, What am I to do?

I have no child. I am always scared of having one.

In the following he talks to the local poet from his province, Amir Pâzvâri, who writes verse in the classical style:

Amir says, My heart has sorrow for Hâji.

Nimâ says, My heart has grief for you.

The world it has thousands of people in it

I swear to you, Amir, that it has a few like you and me.

Above all, it should be noticed the element of love in Rojâ, something that can be found in only a few of Nimâ's Persian-language works such as Afsâneh or “A Shepherd in search of a remedy.” Here, Nimâ speaks freely about the sexual love in rustic life:

Oh ebony child, don't flirt with your eyes, 

Don't set me on fire right from the start

Don't let my fantasy surpass its limits

Don't look, lest I die, give me no sorrow.

     . . .

Look at the black man and his nails

One blow from his hand can knock down all the unripe damson plums

The wasp stings me and flies away

I eat bitter damsons and twist around

In the following, Nimâ asks the reed player to “sing Tabari”, a mournful style of singing, similar to the better-known sharveh style practiced in the Southern part of Iran:

At night, tell sorrow not to go but to stay with me

Owl of my soul, fly and come to me 

O reed-player, sing Tabari for Nimâ

That the runaway love has rent my liver in two.

Nature has granted Nimâ and his lover different things:

The sea is my mother, she gave me rhythm

My father is the sun, he gave my own color

The world turned my lover's heart to stone

It hit me and called out to me.

In the following, notice the country girl's hesitation in love:

The girl would not let me see her face

If I want to look at her, she will say, How mean you are!

I want to go. She says, My heart is torn in two.

I come, she turns back and says, I'm not coming.

The boy says, Her eyes are so full of joy.

The girl says, He's so nice!

She looks at him. She wants him, but her hand is tied.

She keeps her heart but apparently she cannot keep her hands.

And again,

In the village of Bol, look at the Boli girl, 

She's an unpicked damson plum, look at her feet and baggy pantaloons

When she laughs, look at her blooming face.

When she moves away, look at her lovely gestures.

Love, for the poet, even has the capacity to make him free from attachment to nature:

There is water in my garden, I do not want water

I, myself, have a moon, I do not want the night with a moonlight

You said: ‘I am far from you,' but I am near

I am awake, come for I don't need to sleep.

The poet identifies his own separation from love with that of animals:

The bull is going, where is my spring time?

My eyes are shedding tears, where is the field of tulips?

The bulls came, where are the calves and the cowboy?

I opened the stables, the horse came, where is the rider?

In the following poem, notice how the poet sees his own lonely heart as a dove:

In the dark of the night, there was unrest in my bed

I shouted: Is this a moving dove?

I touched it, its wings were in motion

Nothing! Only my heart was moving by my side.

He saw the separation from his love as the eclipse of the moon:

My sweetheart took my hand

I wanted to tell her how good she was

An eclipse occurred and sat on the crown of the moon

A dove trembled to death by my side.

In the following rustic poem, the poet plays with the name “golbon” spring which means springs of flowers:

Friends! the water of Golbon spring is so good

If you go to Golbon spring, you will see the field of flowers

The flower takes water and spills from her clay jar

I drink water, sneaking a glance at Golnar.

Sometimes we even see eroticism and a sense of humor in Rojâ:

The girl put aside her quilt and got up

I saw her legs, all naked

She said: ‘Who are you?' I said: ‘your mother, she wants to embrace her daughter.'

Nevertheless, even from a purely artistic point of view, some of Rojâ's couplets have the quality of a complete haiku for example in the following poem he speaks of an impending death:

They played kettledrum and rang the bell

The sea trembled and turned into ebony

The rider came and fell down hopelessly

In the midst of the storm who is carrying a lantern?

Notice how the poet in the following piece admires experience and endurance in love and life as a whole:

An uncoiled thread has no strength

A young horse will leave you in the middle of the road

Unless the fog becomes dense, It won't rain in the mountain

A man who is not heart-broken will not shed any tears.

Here the poet in solitude contemplates the mystery of life:

It is night, and I resemble an owl

I mark a tree and traverse the grove

What is murmuring behind the walls, I do not know

What is written there, I can not see

And finally, in the following poem, the reader does not find out whether the poet is in despair or hope:

Oh children! the sea appears stormy

The big wind blew and the fog is dispersing

A man is coming, A man is going

Is this the end of the night or not, who knows?

These poems are written in a looser form of the robâ‘i (quatrain). The quatrain did not exist in Arabic poetry and was added to the Islamic repertoire by Persian poets such as ‘Omar Khayyâm. In dobeiti, the rhyme pattern is the same as in the quatrain, only that the poet does not rigidly follow a metric foot. It is said that this haiku-like form dates from pre-Islamic times and has always been used in provincial dialects by local bards such as Bâbâ Tâher and Fâ'ez >>> Chapter 4-F