TEHRAN -- On an autumn day in Shiraz, a book of poems can serve as a kind of compass. Its reader may be looking for consolation, an answer, a warning, or simply a few lines that seem to know something about the present. 
On October 12, Iran marked Hafez Day, the annual commemoration of the fourteenth-century poet whose verses have outlived the circumstances of their making and entered the intimate rituals of everyday life.
At Hafezieh, the garden tomb where Hafez is buried, admirers gathered on Monday to pay tribute to the poet. According to Iranian arts publication Honar Online, the ceremony included a flower shower at the mausoleum attended by writers, cultural figures, members of the public and provincial officials. 
The occasion was both public commemoration and private encounter: a meeting with a writer whose work is read across generations, often one reader and one poem at a time. 
Hafez, born in Shiraz in the fourteenth century, is among the defining voices of Persian literature. His ghazals—lyrical poems shaped by love, longing, spiritual uncertainty and the instability of worldly power—resist a single, settled interpretation. 
The beloved may be human or divine; the tavern may be a place of pleasure or a rebuke to hypocrisy. The poems invite readers to inhabit their contradictions rather than resolve them.
This openness helps explain the unusual place Hafez occupies in Iranian life. His Divan, the collection of his poetry, is not confined to classrooms or literary scholarship. Families turn to it for fal-e Hafez, a form of bibliomancy in which a randomly opened poem is read as a reflection on a question or a hope. The practice transforms literature into conversation, allowing a medieval poet to enter decisions and uncertainties that belong to the living.
In the days surrounding this year’s commemoration, Shiraz’s cultural authorities organized public programs under the title “From the Passion of Mysticism to the Mystery of the Ghazal.” 
Hafezieh offered free admission to visitors on October 10 and 11, while October 12 remained the central date of the observance. The broader program sought to bring the poet’s legacy into the city’s shared cultural spaces. 
The annual ceremony also raises a question that Hafez’s poetry has 
long kept open: who owns a poet? Officials may describe him as a pillar of national identity; scholars may trace the architecture of his language; visitors may come seeking a photograph or a moment of quiet. None of these approaches exhausts him. His poems have survived precisely because they accommodate different kinds of belief, doubt and desire.
At Hafezieh, the stone marks the place where the poet’s life ended. The book, carried away by visitors, suggests something else: that his work continues elsewhere—in homes, in gardens, in the pauses between questions and answers. 
Hafez Day commemorates a writer from the distant past, but its enduring subject is the present tense of reading.