Not any gift. A soghâti must come from somewhere: the thing a place is known for, carried home to prove you were there and thought of the people you left. A hedyeh is a gift in general; a soghâti needs the road. In the Shahnameh the heroes brought whole herds back from campaigns; by the twentieth century it had settled into the box of gaz from the bazaar. This song strips the tradition to its floor and names the road's own dust the dearest soghâti.

An Arabic loanword Persian poets have kept close for centuries. Salmân Sâvaji opened a fourteenth century ghazal with the dust of the beloved's foot as kohl for the eye; Hâfez answered it with a ghazal of his own. Nosrat Rahmâni, to whom Sarfarâz dedicated this poem, titled his memoir Mardi ke dar ghobâr gom shod, the man who vanished in the dust. In the title line the word is literal at last: road dust on a shirt, the dearest thing a traveler carries.

In Persian love poetry the pirâhan is the garment that keeps the shape and smell of the person who wore it, and tearing it in grief is a stock image of mourning. The song uses it plainly: the shirt someone walked through the door wearing, dust of the road still on it.

A verb formal Persian poetry mostly keeps outside. Sarfarâz sets it beside didan, seeing, and gives the two equal weight: what the body keeps of an absent person is how they smelled. Not vulgarity, precision.

An Arabic loanword with a moral charge. Havas is the desire that fades, the opposite of eshgh, the love that deepens. The song refuses it twice in one line, not for myself, not from havas, so that wanting someone for breath lands with its full weight.