https://youtu.be/bY-abmXNqzI

‪@elasticStage‬ ‪@PeacocksTaleMusic‬ The incredible love story of Merwan Irani a young Persian Zoroastrian boy living in British India just before the First World War whose bright future is seemingly wrecked by his sudden overwhelming love for Hazrat Babajan, an ancient Muslim woman seated in a gutter under a neem tree on the boy's cycle route to school. But she is no ordinary ancient Muslim woman. She turns out to be the boy's first Perfect Master who will give him God-realisation and guide him on his own path of Perfect Mastery and a world-shaking role in our time as Avatar Meher Baba. From "A Life Supremely Lived. A Biography of Meher Baba in ghazals" IV. The Kiss (Poona, January 1914)

Babajan’s wild May embrace fills up to empty all his daze. He is half-dead to the whole world and its crazed, cold, lonely ways. All this world can give him nothing, has no meaning, only Her. In the classroom, on the games field, he no longer wins its praise. All the gross world once his oyster now is nothing but a shell; Every evening in her gutter, mute with love’s unspoken phrase. Ah! her rose lips brush his man’s brow… little finger points, “Behold, World! my dear Son who will shake you and awake you with his rays.” Numb, his fraught form stumbles homewards, gropes, abstracted and amazed, To his bed, lies absent-minded, oh that sleepless vacant gaze! Ah! a strangler’s thousand strong hands seem to seize him by the throat. Krishna’s black hole, Buddha’s great void; sweet nirvana’s self-erase. All her love-shock, felt that Mayday, has reprised her guiding Light At a thousand times the voltage, leads him, love-blind, through the haze. Holy terror as his veins turn into livewires, flesh to Light, Breath to vacuum; heart to stilled drum, ego-mind shelled like a glaze. Let her God-hands lift his boy face as her God-eye meets his Eye: Let her God-kiss lift his torn veil and consume him in her blaze! Oh Ghaz, stop! words can’t imagine with what fear poor Merwan shook As her soul-kiss killed and razed him, that our winters should be Mays. © Gareth Calway 2026. The poetic form is the classical Persian ghazal (in English), as perfectly employed by Hafiz to convey mystical divine love and designed to express abandoned emotion at the same time as it negotiates a fiendishly demanding metre and rhyme scheme. Piano - Maz Vocals, harp, bass, drums - Gaz.

Spoken word version - Gaz.