TEHRAN – On Thursday in the sun-drenched town of Bafq, an intimate gathering convened to honor one of Persian literature’s most incandescent voices: Vahshi Bafqi. 
Vahshi—born in 939 AH, a product of the austere deserts of Yazd—has long been known as a poet of searing intensity, whose work resists the blandishments of courtly praise in favor of a more elemental, raw articulation of passion and pain. 
As Hussein Maserrat, a cultural scholar and tireless custodian of Bafqi’s legacy, remarked during the event, “Vahshi’s poetry is a furnace; it burns quietly beneath the surface, but it is always alight.”
The afternoon was punctuated by readings from Farhad and Shirin and selections from his renowned Divan, his verses carrying through the arid air with a haunting clarity. Among those gathered, there was a palpable sense of the poet’s reach — beyond Iran’s borders, into the literary traditions of India, Pakistan, and even Tajikistan, where one of the six traditional musical maqams bears his name.
Maserrat’s commentary illuminated not only the poet’s biography—his formative years under the tutelage of Sharaf al-Din Ali Bafqi, his reluctant but necessary courtship of the rulers of Yazd, and his later years teaching in places like Kashan and Hormuz—but also the enduring nature of his work. 
The poem beginning, “O God, grant my heart a flame,” a Ramadan refrain, felt at once ancient and immediate, emblematic of poetry that transcends time and place.
The event also marked the unveiling of a bronze statue in Bafq, a tangible monument to a voice that once seemed ephemeral but has become permanent, almost elemental. 
Plans to establish October 10th as a national day in his honor promise to make this gathering an annual homage to a poet whose heart still burns brightly in the literary imagination.