نیاز (Niyāz / “Reflection”) & Reflection
Philosophical Analysis — Draft 002
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, June 18, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. The Epistemology of Reflection
In classical mysticism, the search for the Divine often implies looking outward toward the heavens or embarking on a physical pilgrimage. Dr. Bemanian’s Reflection reverses this vector from the very first line: bāz didār be didār-e to bā khod kardam, “Again I held a meeting with myself, by way of meeting you.”
Philosophically, this establishes an epistemology of mirroring. The truth of the Beloved is not found as an external object, but is accessed by “clasping to your reflection, replication, and manifestation within my heart.” To reach the ultimate reality, one must become “incisive, heedful, vigilant, and attentive” to one’s own internal state. The self becomes the telescope through which the cosmos is observed.
The poem is exact about what this method can and cannot deliver, and it says so in the order of three words. A reflection is an image; a replication is a copy; a manifestation is the thing appearing. The method begins with the least of these. Whoever looks within sees first an image, and an image depends on the surface that carries it. The whole of the poem’s argument follows from taking that seriously. An inward search is the right search, and it is conducted with an instrument, the heart, whose condition decides what is seen. The opening word of the poem, bāz, “again,” admits that the instrument has been used before and has not yet shown what it could.
II. Conjecture and the Idols of Deterrence
The poem introduces a sophisticated critique of human perception in the second beyt. When the lover attempts to depict the Beloved’s spirit (tal’at, akhtar), the result is “imprecise and blurred.”
The Persian names the faculty at fault with precision. It is engār, supposition: the mind’s “as if.” And it names the manner of the fault with a preposition. The supposition is laid bar, upon, the countenance. What the lover takes for a perception of the Beloved is a layer of his own making over the Beloved. The English calls the products of this faculty “the stars, icons, and idols of deterrence, preemption, and preclusion.” The three nouns that qualify the idols are worth reading slowly. An idol of deterrence discourages the approach. An idol of preemption occupies the place before the real thing can. An idol of preclusion rules the real thing out. These are not false gods in the old sense, rivals to the true one. They are the seeker’s own depictions, doing the work of obstacles.
The English then adds a second failure, joined to the first by “Or.” It is the failure of “premises and presumptions,” which do not blur an image but prevent discrimination: “not discerning and distinguishing the aptitudes, promises, and attributes ceaselessly unveiled and preferred by the vastness and immensity of the celestial cosmos.” The philosophical position in that sentence is a strong one. The cosmos is not silent, and it is not hidden. It unveils “ceaselessly.” If less than its full stature is received, the loss has occurred at the receiver.
The Persian states the loss in one word: the lover made the holy stature of the world abtar, cut short, and he made it so be khod, by himself and to his own measure. The philosophical warning here is clear: our attempts to concretely define the Divine often diminish it. The poem goes further than the warning. It assigns the diminishment. No one in this poem is deceived by another. The only agent of the error is the one who confesses it.
III. The Ontology of the Soil (Khār o Khāshāk)
Perhaps the most profound philosophical turn occurs in the fifth beyt, where Dr. Bemanian dismantles the traditional hierarchy of value. We typically associate the sublime with the high (stars, sky, blossoms). However, Reflection argues that the lowest, most discarded elements of existence, thorn and chaff in the Persian (khār o khāshāk), “soil and dirt” in the English, are the actual “messengers and revealers of love songs.”
This is a philosophy of radical interconnectedness and grounding. The “lavender flowers” (representing elevation and beauty) only learn the “joy, elation, and charm of elevation” through the whispers of the dirt they grow from. Spiritually, this suggests that enlightenment is not achieved by escaping the material, messy, or painful aspects of life (the thorns and soil), but by listening to them. They are the foundational chorus that makes the song of the cosmos possible.
Two details make the claim more exact than a general praise of humble things.
The first is the verb. Dahand, “they give,” is the only verb in the Persian poem whose subject is not the speaker. For eight lines the lover has been the one who acts, and his acting has produced a blurred image and a truncated world. In the ninth line the lowest things act, and what they give is a ghazal, the very kind of poem this is. The philosophical point is about the source of knowledge. What the lover could not produce by searching, he is given, and the givers are the things he would have stepped over.
The second is the word khār. In the fourth beyt it was khār-e del, the thorn of the heart: the lover’s own pain. In the fifth the same word stands at the head of the line that sings. The Persian is saying that a person’s wound is among his teachers. The English widens the claim by changing the image from thorn to soil. The soil is not what hurts the flower. It is what holds it up, feeds it, and goes unseen. Between them the two texts name both things a person is inclined to overlook in favor of the bloom: what injures him and what supports him.
IV. The Paradox of the Unrecognized Sanctuary
In the third beyt, the poem explores a tragic irony of the human condition: “Not to realize, recognize, and apprehend my inherent intuition and dexterity, to become an inhabitant of the plateaus filled with crystal clear streams.”
The lover already possesses the capacity to dwell in Kowsar (the stream of Paradise), but lacks the self-awareness to recognize it. The tent of the soul may already be pitched in the sacred space, but the mind’s failure to recognize its own “inherent intuition and dexterity” keeps it in a state of seeking. The search (talabi bud ke az sar giram) is both necessary and paradoxical, as the seeker may be dwelling in the destination without knowing it.
The Persian sharpens the paradox with a pair of words that belong together. Kowsar means abundance. It ends the line that follows the one ending on abtar, cut off. The two are the first and last key words of the 108th chapter of the Qur’an, the shortest in the book: We have given you al-Kawthar. So pray to your Lord and sacrifice. It is the one who hates you who is al-abtar. There, abundance and severance fall on two different people. Dr. Bemanian puts both on one. His speaker is the one who severed, and the one who may be standing in the abundance.
The philosophy in that arrangement is a claim about scarcity. The lover’s condition feels to him like lack: he thirsts, he seeks, he prays toward need. The poem’s suggestion is that the lack is not a fact about his circumstances. It is the result of his own cutting. A person can stand in plenty and experience want, if he has trimmed what he is shown to the size of what he supposes. The line does not let the reader settle this comfortably. It says nadānim, “we do not know,” in the only plural of the poem. The not-knowing is the common human situation, and it is left open.
V. Need as a Faculty
The Persian title is Niyāz: need. It names a condition that most traditions would call a deficiency. The poem does not treat it as one.
It gives need three names and three places. In the first beyt it is hājat, a lack, and the lover prays facing it. In the third it is talab, a quest, something taken up again from the beginning. In the sixth it is tamannā, longing, and it stands in the same line as the light of the Beloved’s being. Need is not removed anywhere in this sequence. It is educated. It begins as the direction the lover faces, becomes the road he walks, and ends as the state in which he is drunk on light.
The English is explicit about what this faculty can do even at its lowest. The first murmurs of the poem respond to “the glimmer and gleam emanated from the essence of my desire, and the alluding depth of my demand and yearning.” The first light in the poem comes from the need itself. Later the English says that “the sheer demand and the thirst of seeking” are what raise the Beloved’s song to its height: they “perpetually peaked the reverberation of your songs.” On this account need is not the absence of the good. It is the organ by which the good is detected. The error of the second beyt was not that the lover needed. It was that he supposed. The poem’s correction leaves the need in place and removes the supposition.
That is why the poem can end as it does. A poem that regarded need as a defect would end in satisfaction, the need filled and gone. This one ends in bey’at, an oath of allegiance, made “in the longing of imagination.” The lover binds himself while he is still longing. The English calls what he proclaims “the pledge of content and fulfilment,” and the phrase should be read as it stands. The fulfilment is pledged. It is the content of a promise and not a possession.
VI. The Mechanics of Intoxication
The final beyt reframes the classical Sufi concept of masti (intoxication). Here, the lover is not drunk on wine, nor even on the direct presence of the Beloved. Instead, the intoxication is driven by “the glimpse of your presence and attendance” combined with “vibrant pondering and reflection on my aspirations, desires, and dreams.”
Intoxication here is an active, intellectual, and imaginative state (tamannā-ye khiyāl). It is the realization that destiny (kowkab-e bakht) is fulfilled not when the search ends, but when one fully pledges to the internal reflection of the Beloved’s light. The journey of reflection brings the seeker back to himself, but this time, the self is entirely illuminated.
Three things about this state deserve to be said plainly. First, it is modest about how much is seen. The English never claims a vision. It has a “glimpse,” as it had “glimmer,” “gleam,” and an “awakening glimpse” before; its light arrives in small amounts from the first line to the last. The drunkenness is not the result of a flood. It is what a prepared mind does with a glimpse. Second, the image that the lover could not make in the second beyt, “your spirit, presence, and attendance,” is the same thing he now finds “entrenched within my soul.” The repetition of the phrase is the poem’s statement that the failed depiction and the true presence had the same object. The difference was in the way of looking. Third, the Persian keeps its refrain. The last word of the poem is still kardam, “I did.” After all its correction of the acting self, the poem does not end in passivity. It ends in a deed, and the deed is the one kind of act that the corrected self can perform without repeating its error: an act of allegiance, which adds nothing of its own to what it is pledged to.
VII. Philosophical Context: The Way in the Lowest Thing, and Attention as Prayer
Two thinkers, neither used elsewhere in this series, mark out the ground on which this poem stands.
The Zhuangzi, the Daoist classic of the fourth century BCE, contains the most famous exchange in any literature on where the highest is to be found. In Burton Watson’s translation:
Master Dongguo asked Zhuangzi, “This thing called the Way—where does it exist?” Zhuangzi said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.” “Come,” said Master Dongguo, “you must be more specific!” “It is in the ant.” “As low a thing as that?” “It is in the panic grass.” “But that is lower still!” “It is in bricks and shards.” “How can it be so low?” “It is in the piss and shit!” Master Dongguo made no reply.
The descent is the argument. Each answer is lower than the last, and the questioner’s dismay is the measure of the hierarchy he brought with him. Dr. Bemanian’s fifth beyt makes the same descent in one line, from the hyacinth to thorn and chaff, and the English takes it a step further, to “soil and dirt.” Both texts hold that a mind which looks for the highest only in high places has misunderstood what it is looking for.
The poem parts from the Zhuangzi at two points, and both are its own. Zhuangzi’s claim is one of presence: the Way is in the lowest thing, as it is in everything. The poem’s claim is one of agency: the lowest things give. They are “messengers and revealers,” they sing to the flower, and what they give is a love song. The low is not only a place where the high may also be found. It is where the high is taught. And Master Dongguo “made no reply”; the exchange ends with the questioner silenced. The lover of Niyāz is not silenced. His eye opens, his heart is sparked “to hear the echo of soil and dirt whispers,” and he goes on to swear an oath. The ancient text uses the low to stop a certain kind of question. The poem uses it to start a certain kind of listening.
Simone Weil, writing in France in the early 1940s, gave the modern West its most exact account of the faculty this poem calls on from its first line. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” she wrote in the notebooks published as Gravity and Grace. The English companion opens with four words for that faculty, “incisive, heedful, vigilant, and attentive,” and the Persian sets them at a qibla. When the poem later names what went wrong in the rose valley, it names a failure of the same faculty: the thorns drew “the attention, awareness, and devotion away from the blossoms.” For Weil as for Dr. Bemanian, the moral and spiritual life is largely a matter of where attention rests.
Weil also drew a line that the poem tests. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” she wrote in an essay collected in Waiting for God. The English of this poem says “searching” of the lover three times, and each search fails or falls short; its correction comes when “the dream of you” is “capturing, seizing, and annexing” his thoughts. So far the poem is Weil’s. But it does not give up the search for the waiting. Its third beyt has the lover take the quest up again from the start, and its last has him act. Dr. Bemanian’s position is that the search was never the error. The supposition was. A seeker may keep seeking, with his need intact, so long as he lets what he finds be given to him and does not lay his own image over it.
Between the Zhuangzi and Weil the poem’s position can be stated in a sentence. It looks where the first tells one to look, at the lowest thing, and with the faculty the second describes; and it adds what belongs to neither, that the lowest thing has a voice, and that the right answer to hearing it is a pledge.
VIII. Conclusion
Reflection is a poem about how a person comes to know what is closest to him. It holds that the inward search is the right one and that it begins with an image, which depends on the surface that bears it. It holds that the characteristic error of the seeker is supposition, his own picture laid over what he looks at, and that the cost of the error is paid by the world, whose stature he cuts to his own measure. It holds that a person can be camped at the water and not know it. It holds that need is not a defect to be cured but the faculty by which the good is sensed, and that it wants educating and not extinguishing. And it holds, at its center, that the correction comes from below: from the thorn in one’s own heart and the ground under one’s feet, which were giving the love song all along. Dr. Bemanian does not present these as doctrines. He presents them as things he did and things that were given to him, in a poem whose refrain is “I did” and whose turning line belongs to someone else.
IX. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian was trained as a physicist, and a physicist learns early that what an instrument reports is partly a report about the instrument. An image is “imprecise and blurred” for reasons that can be found in the apparatus; a model laid over the data will return the model. Niyāz, written in 2017, brings that knowledge to the oldest method in mystical poetry, the search within. Its lover uses his heart as his instrument, mistakes his supposition for an observation, and learns the difference from the humblest evidence available. The same discipline governs Dr. Bemanian’s historical volumes on modern Iran, which examine what a society loses when it receives its “premises and presumptions” ready-made and stops checking them against what is in front of it. The poem shows the personal form of that inquiry. Its speaker has no one to blame for his blurred picture of the world, and so he is free to correct it.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
نیاز (Niyāz / “Reflection”) & Reflection
Formal Expanded Analysis — Draft 002
Poem by Alireza Bemanian, June 18, 2017
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
I. Introduction
Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s Niyāz (titled “Reflection” in English) is a six-beyt ghazal that navigates the intricate landscape of self-discovery, spiritual yearning, and the dialectic between the sublime and the lowly. The poem is characterized by a deep introspection, where the lover looks within himself to find the Beloved’s manifestation. Its Persian title means need. Its English title names the place where that need goes looking, and also the act of thinking it over.
The form states the poem’s subject before a reader has taken in a single image. Eight of the twelve hemistichs end on the same word, kardam: “I did,” “I made.” This is a poem of deeds owned in the first person. The lover made the meeting, made the murmur, made the conjecture, and made the damage that the conjecture caused. He does not say that the Beloved was veiled or far. He says what he did.
The English companion text operates as a sweeping psychological and philosophical expansion of the Persian axioms. Where the Persian uses the word didār (visitation, meeting), the English unpacks it into a rigorous inner searching: “Searching within, incisive, heedful, vigilant, and attentive.” Dr. Bemanian weaves natural imagery, stars, crystal streams, bouquets, thorns, and soil, into a cohesive framework that charts the soul’s journey through misperception, suffering, and ultimate realization. And the English does one thing the Persian cannot. In 384 words it never says “I.” The search goes on, sentence after sentence, and the searcher is seen only in what belongs to him: “my heart,” “my desire,” “my soul.”
The poem’s turn comes in its fifth beyt, and it comes from below. For four beyts the lover has looked to a countenance, a star, the holy stature of the world, the river of Paradise. Then one line changes the grammar and the direction together: thorn and chaff give the hyacinth its love song. It is the only line in the poem in which someone other than the speaker acts. Dr. Bemanian’s conviction in this poem is that the eye opens when it is lowered.
II. A Reader’s Guide
The poem’s structure follows a journey of inward reflection, encountering obstacles, and finding enlightenment in unexpected places.
| Beyt | Stage | What the lover does | Rhyme word | Its meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Introspective Quest: reaching the Beloved by searching within, then the murmur of supplication | holds a meeting with himself; turns laments into a murmur | khod, hājat | self; need |
| 2 | The Blur of Misperception: an imprecise portrayal and the “idols of deterrence” | lays a supposition on the countenance; cuts short the world’s holy stature | akhtar, abtar | star; cut off |
| 3 | The Unquenchable Thirst: the quest resumed, and the sanctuary not recognized | takes the quest up again; may already have camped at the sacred stream | Kowsar | the river of Paradise; abundance |
| 4 | The Distraction of Thorns: waking in the rose valley | gathers thorn and rose together | por | full |
| 5 | The Revelation in the Soil: the lowly as messengers of love | takes the dream of the Beloved into his head; the eye opens | sar | head |
| 6 | The Intoxicated Pledge: drunk on the light of the Beloved’s being | swears allegiance | bey’at | allegiance |
Three features of the form matter for everything that follows.
The refrain is a confession. The radif, the word repeated after the rhyme, is kardam, and it closes both hemistichs of the first beyt, both hemistichs of the second, and the second hemistich of every beyt after. A ghazal ordinarily rhymes both halves of its opening beyt only. This one does it twice, so that the poem begins with four consecutive lines ending “I did.” Those four lines are the self-enclosed part of the journey: the meeting held with oneself, the murmur, the supposition, and the truncation. The rhyme loosens at the third beyt, at the point where the poem begins to open outward.
The four free lines. The first hemistichs of beyts 3 to 6 are the only lines that do not end on kardam, and their endings make a sequence of their own: giram (“that I may take up”), gardam (“I become”), dahand (“they give”), khiyāl (“imagination,” a noun, in a line with no verb at all). The speaker goes from intending, to changing, to receiving what others give, to a state that needs no verb.
Where “self” and “you” stand. The word khod, “self,” occurs three times, once in each of the first three beyts, and never again. The Beloved is addressed as “you” in the first line (didār-e to), and then not for three beyts; in the second beyt there is only “that countenance,” held at a distance by the word that. “You” returns in the fifth beyt (ro’yā-ye to, “the dream of you”) and again in the sixth (vojudat, “your being”). The lover’s self fills the first half of the poem and the Beloved is missing from its middle. What brings the Beloved back is the line about thorn and chaff.
III. Beyt-by-Beyt Reading
Beyt 1: The Inner Visitation and Supplication
باز دیدار به دیدار تو با خود کردم
ناله ها زمزمه در قبله حاجت کردم
Bāz didār be didār-e to bā khod kardam
Nāle-hā zamzame dar qeble-ye hājat kardam
Again I held a meeting with myself, by way of meeting you,
and made my laments a murmur at the qibla of need.
The opening line establishes the poem’s central premise: the lover seeks a meeting (didār) with the Beloved by looking within himself. The line is built as a mirror. Didār stands in it twice, side by side with only a preposition between, so that the meeting with the Beloved and the meeting with the self face each other in the syntax. Didār comes from the verb to see; it is a meeting in which one beholds. The first word, bāz, “again,” says that this is not the first attempt. The second half of the beyt lowers the voice. Nāle is a lament, a cry; zamzame is a murmur, a thing said under the breath. The lover turns the one into the other, and he does it facing a qeble, the direction of prayer. His qibla is hājat, need. He prays toward his own lack.
Beyt 2: The Idols of Deterrence
تا که انگار بر آن طلعت و اختر کردم
قامت قدس جهان را به خود ابتر کردم
Tā ke engār bar ān tal’at o akhtar kardam
Qāmat-e qods-e jahān rā be khod abtar kardam
Until I laid a supposition on that countenance and star,
and by myself cut short the holy stature of the world.
The poet explores the limitations of human perception. Engār is a supposition, an “as if.” The lover places it bar, upon, the Beloved’s countenance (tal’at) and star (akhtar): he covers what he looks at with what he supposes. The consequence is stated in the strongest word in the poem. The “holy stature of the world” (qāmat-e qods-e jahān) is rendered abtar: cut short, severed, left without issue. And the line says by whom: be khod, “by myself,” “to my own measure.” The vastness was not withheld from him. He trimmed it.
Abtar is not an ordinary word, and Dr. Bemanian has not placed it by accident. It is the last word of the shortest chapter of the Qur’an, and that chapter’s first verse ends on the word that closes the next beyt of this poem.
Beyt 3: The Unrecognized Sanctuary
باز جورم طلبی بود که از سر گیرم
خود ندانیم گرش خیمه به کوثر کردم
Bāz jowram talabi bud ke az sar giram
Khod nadānim garash kheyme be Kowsar kardam
Again, my hardship was a quest I was to take up anew;
we ourselves do not know whether I had pitched its tent at Kowsar.
Despite the misperceptions, the demand of seeking remains, and bāz, “again,” opens the beyt as it opened the poem. Jowr is the classical word for the harshness a lover suffers; here the hardship is itself called a talab, a quest, and the lover’s response to it is az sar giram: to take it up from the start. The ear also catches a near neighbor, jor’e, a draught of drink, and the English companion draws that neighboring word out when it speaks of “the thirst of seeking.”
The second hemistich laments a lack of self-awareness. Kowsar is the river of Paradise, and the word means abundance. The lover says that it is not known whether the tent of his quest already stands on its bank. The verb of not knowing is plural, nadānim, “we do not know,” the only “we” in the poem; the not-knowing is not his alone. He may be camped at the water he is thirsting for.
Read with the beyt before it, the line completes an allusion. The 108th chapter of the Qur’an has three verses: We have given you al-Kawthar. So pray to your Lord and sacrifice. It is the one who hates you who is al-abtar. Abundance is the first verse’s last word, and “cut off” is the last word of the chapter. Dr. Bemanian sets the two words at the ends of consecutive lines and reverses their order. He also changes whom they fall on. In the chapter the abundance is a gift to the one addressed and the cutting-off is the fate of his enemy. In the poem one speaker stands under both words. He has been his own adversary, the one who cut the world short, and he may also be, without knowing it, the one to whom abundance was given.
Beyt 4: The Rose Garden and the Thorns
وه چو بیدار بر این وادی گلگون گردم
خار دل همدم گل جمله یکی پر کردم
Vah cho bidār bar in vādi-ye golgun gardam
Khār-e del hamdam-e gol jomle yeki por kardam
Ah, when I come awake upon this rose-red valley,
the thorn of the heart, companion of the rose: I gathered all of it as one, in full.
The beyt opens on a cry, vah, and on waking. The lover finds himself in a “crimson valley” (vādi-ye golgun), and the abundance that the last beyt could not confirm is now under his feet. What he does there is told in three small words: jomle, all; yeki, one; por, full. He fills his arms without sorting. The thorn that he carries is his own, khār-e del, “the thorn of the heart,” and the line calls it hamdam-e gol, the rose’s companion, literally the one who shares its breath. The rhyme word is por, “full”: after abtar, cut short, and Kowsar, abundance, the poem arrives at fullness, and thorns are part of it.
Beyt 5: The Songs of Thorn and Chaff
خار و خاشاک به سنبل غزل عشق دهند
دیده را باز چو رویای تو در سر کردم
Khār o khāshāk be sonbol ghazal-e eshq dahand
Dide rā bāz cho ro’yā-ye to dar sar kardam
Thorn and chaff give the hyacinth the ghazal of love;
the eye came open when I took the dream of you into my head.
Here lies the philosophical turn of the poem. The lowest elements, khār o khāshāk, thorn and chaff, the sweepings of the ground, are revealed not as mere impediments but as givers. The verb is dahand, “they give,” and it is the only verb in the poem whose subject is neither “I” nor “we.” For one line the speaker is not the one acting. What the lowly things give is named with the poem’s own name: a ghazal. The poem the reader is holding is a ghazal of love, and it says here where such a thing comes from.
The second hemistich returns to kardam and to the Beloved, who is addressed again for the first time since the opening line. The word bāz returns too, for the third time, and its meaning has changed. In the first and third beyts it meant “again.” Here it stands beside dide, the eye, and means “open.” The poem’s again has become an opening. And where the second beyt had a supposition laid upon the Beloved’s countenance, this one has a dream taken into the head (dar sar). The image that covered has been replaced by an image that is received.
Beyt 6: The Inebriated Pledge
مست از آن نور وجودت به تمنای خیال
کوکب بخت در این باده چه بیعت کردم
Mast az ān nur-e vojudat be tamannā-ye khiyāl
Kowkab-e bakht dar in bāde che bey’at kardam
Drunk on that light of your being, in the longing of imagination:
star of fortune, in this wine, what an allegiance I have sworn!
The final beyt mirrors the classical ghazal conclusion of intoxication (mast), but here the wine is not physical. The first hemistich has no verb. It is a state, and the lover is simply in it: drunk on “the light of your being” (nur-e vojudat). The second hemistich brings back a star. In the second beyt the star, akhtar, was something the lover supposed about and got wrong. Here it is kowkab-e bakht, the star of fortune, and he does not interpret it. He swears to it. Bey’at is the oath of allegiance, the giving of one’s hand; the particle che makes the line an exclamation, what an allegiance. The last kardam of the poem is the one deed in it that binds the doer to something beyond himself.
IV. “Reflection” — The English Companion Poem, Complete
Beyt 1
باز دیدار به دیدار تو با خود کردم
Searching within, incisive, heedful, vigilant, and attentive, reaching to you by clasping to your reflection, replication, and manifestation within my heart.
ناله ها زمزمه در قبله حاجت کردم
Murmurings, purring, whisperings, and mutterings all to revive and recuperate the incurred lows and blows although spontaneous and transient, revering and responding to the glimmer and gleam emanated from the essence of my desire, and the alluding depth of my demand and yearning.
Interpretation: The English expands the inner meeting beautifully: “reaching to you by clasping to your reflection, replication, and manifestation within my heart.” The triad repays attention. A reflection is an image in a mirror; a replication is a copy; a manifestation is the thing itself appearing. The three words climb from image to presence, and the Persian’s doubled didār becomes, in English, a word that means doubling. The second line translates the murmur four ways, “Murmurings, purring, whisperings, and mutterings,” and gives it a purpose, “to revive and recuperate the incurred lows and blows.” It then says what the murmur answers to, and it is not the Beloved. It is “the glimmer and gleam emanated from the essence of my desire, and the alluding depth of my demand and yearning.” The light the lover first responds to comes from his own need. That is the Persian’s qibla of need, stated exactly.
Beyt 2
تا که انگار بر آن طلعت و اختر کردم
Searching within my desires and dreams of depicting your spirit, presence, and attendance. Though the perceived portrayal inadvertently was imprecise and blurred, yielding and succumbing to the stars, icons, and idols of deterrence, preemption, and preclusion.
قامت قدس جهان را به خود ابتر کردم
Or, searching within the premises and presumptions not discerning and distinguishing the aptitudes, promises, and attributes ceaselessly unveiled and preferred by the vastness and immensity of the celestial cosmos.
Interpretation: The English names the second search, “Searching within my desires and dreams of depicting your spirit, presence, and attendance,” and reports the result as a fault of the instrument: “the perceived portrayal inadvertently was imprecise and blurred.” What the Persian compresses into the star, the English opens into “the stars, icons, and idols of deterrence, preemption, and preclusion.” These are images that stand in the way of what they depict. The next sentence begins with “Or,” and offers a third search, “within the premises and presumptions,” which fails differently: by “not discerning and distinguishing the aptitudes, promises, and attributes ceaselessly unveiled and preferred by the vastness and immensity of the celestial cosmos.” The English frames the Persian’s abtar as a failure to take in what is being shown without pause. The cosmos unveils “ceaselessly.” The truncation is on the receiving side.
Beyt 3
باز جورم طلبی بود که از سر گیرم
Still, the sheer demand and the thirst of seeking your gesture, and the apprehended gradual intimation perpetually peaked the reverberation of your songs, your chant of continuation; the chorus of culmination.
خود ندانیم گرش خیمه به کوثر کردم
Not to realize, recognize, and apprehend my inherent intuition and dexterity, to become an inhabitant of the plateaus filled with crystal clear streams, the place to position my soul-searching tent, to remain within your sacredness.
Interpretation: “Still,” the English begins, and the word carries the Persian’s bāz. The hardship of the Persian line becomes “the sheer demand and the thirst of seeking your gesture,” and its resumption, az sar giram, becomes music: the thirst “perpetually peaked the reverberation of your songs, your chant of continuation; the chorus of culmination.” Continuation and culmination are set side by side, as if to keep going were already to arrive. The second line does not name Kowsar. It describes it: “the plateaus filled with crystal clear streams, the place to position my soul-searching tent, to remain within your sacredness.” And it states precisely what is not known. It is not the place. It is the lover’s own capacity: “Not to realize, recognize, and apprehend my inherent intuition and dexterity.” The line before this one says “your” three times, more than any other in the poem, and this one says it again; the Beloved is nearest in the English at the moment the lover fails to know where he stands.
Beyt 4
وه چو بیدار بر این وادی گلگون گردم
Merely if, the immense bouquet of flowers spread at any spot within the spectacle of the heart are cherry picked, varnished, and glanced at. The awakening glimpse, capable of enlightening the path, to fortify and reinforce the covet of reaching you.
خار دل همدم گل جمله یکی پر کردم
The flower stem thorns, the spikes covering corridor spots spared the attention, awareness, and devotion away from the blossoms of blessings and consecrations, neglecting and averting the instances of flourish and content, to rather disperse and disband the bouquets.
Interpretation: The English describes the “immense bouquet of flowers spread at any spot within the spectacle of the heart” and places the rose valley inside the lover. It opens on a condition, “Merely if,” and never completes it: the flowers are “cherry picked, varnished, and glanced at,” three verbs of shallow looking, and the sentence breaks off. What follows is what a better look would be: “The awakening glimpse, capable of enlightening the path, to fortify and reinforce the covet of reaching you.” The second line reads the Persian’s thorns as a failure of attention. They “spared the attention, awareness, and devotion away from the blossoms of blessings and consecrations,” and the result is the opposite of the Persian’s image. The Persian gathers thorn and rose into one. The English has the bouquets dispersed and disbanded. The difference is taken up in Section VI.
Beyt 5
خار و خاشاک به سنبل غزل عشق دهند
The soil and dirt are the messengers and revealers of love songs to lavender flowers, whispering the joy, elation, and charm of elevation and reach.
دیده را باز چو رویای تو در سر کردم
The dream of you capturing, seizing, and annexing my thoughts, deliberations, and essence has sparked my heart to hear the echo of soil and dirt whispers, immersed in their magnificence, delights, and dedications.
Interpretation: The English gives the turn in a single plain sentence of twenty-five words: “The soil and dirt are the messengers and revealers of love songs to lavender flowers, whispering the joy, elation, and charm of elevation and reach.” The Persian’s thorn and chaff become “soil and dirt,” lower still, and the Persian’s hyacinth becomes lavender. The second line reverses the Persian’s grammar. In the Persian the lover takes the dream into his head. In the English the dream takes him: “The dream of you capturing, seizing, and annexing my thoughts, deliberations, and essence.” And it changes the sense that is awakened. The Persian opens the eye. The English says the dream “has sparked my heart to hear the echo of soil and dirt whispers.” The poem that began with seeing, with didār, ends its search in listening.
Beyt 6
مست از آن نور وجودت به تمنای خیال
Inebriated by the glimpse of your presence and attendance entrenched within my soul, by vibrant pondering and reflection on my aspirations, desires, and dreams.
کوکب بخت در این باده چه بیعت کردم
The destiny, fortune, and fate is striking, pointing towards the guiding stars glimmering the skies, revering the intimacy, and proclaiming the pledge of content and fulfilment.
Interpretation: The lover is “Inebriated by the glimpse of your presence and attendance entrenched within my soul.” The phrase “presence and attendance” has been used once before. In the second beyt it was what the lover tried to depict and blurred: “your spirit, presence, and attendance.” Now the same two words name what is glimpsed, and it is “entrenched within my soul.” It was there. The English then uses its title word for the second time, “by vibrant pondering and reflection on my aspirations, desires, and dreams,” and in a second sense. In the first line a reflection was an image in the heart. In the eleventh it is an act of thought. The closing sentence has neither “your” nor “my” in it. “The destiny, fortune, and fate is striking, pointing towards the guiding stars glimmering the skies, revering the intimacy, and proclaiming the pledge of content and fulfilment.” The stars that were “idols of deterrence” in the second beyt are “guiding stars” in the last.
V. Conceptual Innovations
The seeker as the one who cuts off. The tradition this poem belongs to has many ways of explaining why the Beloved is not seen: the veil, the distance, the jealousy of the Beloved, the unworthiness of the age. Niyāz sets all of them aside and says kardam. Its central act of composition is the placing of two Qur’anic words, abtar and Kowsar, at the ends of consecutive lines, in the reverse of their scriptural order, and under one speaker. In their source the two words divide the world between the one who is given abundance and the one who is cut off. In the poem there is no second party to take the harder word. The lover cut the world’s stature short “by myself,” with nothing more violent than a supposition; and the abundance he was denied may be the ground his tent is standing on. The poem does not resolve this into reassurance. It says “we do not know.” What it does is change the question a seeker asks, from why are you hidden to what did I do to what was shown. That is Dr. Bemanian’s own position, and the refrain makes the reader say it eight times.
The lowly thing sings, and what it sings is this poem. The fifth beyt’s first line is exceptional in three ways at once. It is the only line whose verb has a subject other than the speaker. Its subject is the lowest thing in the poem. And its object is the poem’s own genre: thorn and chaff give the hyacinth “the ghazal of love.” A reader who has followed eight lines of “I did” is told, in the ninth, that the love song is given by what gets swept up. The Persian prepares this with a single repeated word. The thorn of beyt 5 is the thorn of beyt 4, khār, and in beyt 4 it was khār-e del, the thorn of the heart. The singer is the lover’s own wound. This is why the line can restore the Beloved to the poem. “You” has been absent since the first hemistich; it returns in the line that follows this one. The lover does not find the Beloved by rising above the thorn. He finds the Beloved when he lets the thorn speak.
A search with no searcher. The English companion makes a formal decision of its own, and it is as strict as the Persian’s refrain. It has no “I.” Three of its twelve lines begin from the search itself (“Searching within,” “Searching within my desires,” “Or, searching within the premises”), one begins from a state (“Inebriated”), and several have no main verb at all. The self appears ten times as “my” and never as a subject. The effect is the one the title promises. A person looking for himself in a mirror sees what is his, his face, his hands, and never the one who is looking. Two further choices belong with this one. The English gives light only in small amounts: “glimmer and gleam,” “glanced at,” “the awakening glimpse,” “the glimpse of your presence,” stars “glimmering.” It never claims a full illumination, where the Persian says outright “the light of your being.” And it moves the poem’s decisive perception from the eye to the ear. The Persian is a poem of seeing, from didār to dide. The English begins in murmurs and ends its search with a heart sparked “to hear.”
VI. Persian/English Comparison and Stand-Evaluation
The two texts divide their work as the series has taught its readers to expect. The Persian is compact, rhymed, and personal: an “I” who owns his deeds eight times. The English is expansive and subjectless: twelve lines, built in runs of three (“reflection, replication, and manifestation”; “stars, icons, and idols”; “deterrence, preemption, and preclusion”; “capturing, seizing, and annexing”), that follow a search through its failures to its correction. Sixteen such triads stand in 384 words.
Four divergences are worth stating plainly, because each is Dr. Bemanian’s own act of interpretation, made as the author of both texts.
Need and reflection. The Persian title is Niyāz, need, a word that does not occur in the poem itself; the poem supplies three others for it, hājat (need as lack) in the first beyt, talab (need as quest) in the third, and tamannā (need as longing) in the sixth. The English title is “Reflection,” a word that occurs twice and changes meaning between its uses. The Persian names the force that drives the poem. The English names the surface on which the force looks for its object, and then the thinking that corrects it.
Gathered and scattered. In the fourth beyt the Persian lover gathers thorn and rose “all as one,” in full. The English says the thorns drew attention “away from the blossoms” so as “to rather disperse and disband the bouquets.” The images point in opposite directions. The Persian makes its reconciliation of thorn and flower already in the fourth beyt, by calling the thorn the rose’s companion, and the fifth beyt explains it. The English holds the reconciliation back. It lets the fourth beyt be a real loss, attention spent on the wrong thing, so that the fifth arrives as a reversal.
Thorn and soil. The Persian uses one word, khār, for the thorn in the heart and for the thorn that sings. The English separates them. Its thorns (“The flower stem thorns, the spikes”) are the distraction of the fourth beyt, and its singers are “soil and dirt.” In Persian the claim is that the lover’s own pain gives the love song. In English the claim is that the ground gives it, the thing the flower stands in and never looks at. The Persian is the more intimate statement and the English the more general. Together they say that what a person would remove from his life, and what he does not notice under it, are the same teacher.
Who holds the dream. The Persian says I took the dream of you into my head. The English says the dream of you has been “capturing, seizing, and annexing my thoughts.” The Persian keeps its refrain, and its speaker stays the doer to the end. The English, which has no “I” to do anything, lets the lover be taken. The three participles are words for taking territory. After a poem of searching, the English’s answer is that the searcher is found by being occupied.
On the whole, the Persian is the stronger poem as a made object. The mirror of its first line, the two Qur’anic words at its center, the one line in which another subject acts, and the changing sense of bāz do the work of an argument without stating one. The English is the stronger account of how perception fails. It is the only one of the two that distinguishes a blurred depiction from an undiscerning presumption, and the only one that names the shallow look for what it is: “cherry picked, varnished, and glanced at.” The Persian shows a man confessing what he did to what he was shown. The English shows the search going on with no one in the frame, until something takes hold of it.
VII. Literary and Aesthetic Merits
The dialectic of the high and the low. The poem brilliantly contrasts celestial imagery (stars, Kowsar, qāmat-e qods) with earthly, even lowly elements (thorns, chaff, soil, dirt). Dr. Bemanian elevates the khār o khāshāk to the status of messengers of love, demonstrating that divine manifestation is found not only in the pristine but also in the grounded reality of the earth. The contrast is built into the order of the images. The first three beyts look up or away: a countenance, a star, the stature of the world, the river of Paradise. The fourth sets the lover down in a valley. The fifth looks at the ground. Only then does the sixth raise its eyes to a star again, and the star has become trustworthy.
The English as psychological decoder. The Persian text uses deeply traditional mystical vocabulary (qibla, Kowsar, bey’at), which the English text methodically decodes into psychological and emotional states. Pitching a tent at Kowsar is rendered as realizing one’s “inherent intuition and dexterity” to position a “soul-searching tent.” This duality allows the poem to function as both a classical ghazal and a modern psychological exploration. The decoding is also a discipline. Each of the lover’s errors is given a precise name, “imprecise and blurred,” “not discerning and distinguishing,” “glanced at,” so that a reader can recognize it in himself.
Three words for an image. The Persian has three different words for what the mind pictures, and it ranks them by where it puts them. Engār, a supposition, stands in the second beyt, where it does the damage. Ro’yā, a dream or vision, stands in the fifth, where the eye opens. Khiyāl, imagination, stands in the sixth, where the lover is drunk on light. The poem does not distrust the imagination. It distinguishes the image one imposes from the image one is given, and it ends inside the second kind.
A ring of two stars. The poem holds two stars, akhtar in the second beyt and kowkab in the last, and the lover’s relation to them measures how far he has come. He supposes about the first. He swears allegiance by the second. Nothing in the sky has changed between them.
VIII. Literary Comparison: The Nearness That Is Missed
Two poems, neither used elsewhere in this series, stand on either side of Niyāz and show what is its own.
Bidel of Delhi, the great Persian poet of India at the turn of the eighteenth century, opened one of his ghazals with a couplet that Persian speakers still quote when they speak of a nearness that never becomes an arrival:
همه عمر با تو قدح زدیم و نرفت رنج خمار ما
چه قیامتی که نمی‌رسی ز کنار ما به کنار ما
All our life we raised the cup with you, and the ache of our craving never left; what a wonder it is, that you do not arrive from our side to our side. The kinship with Dr. Bemanian’s poem is close. Both poets know that the Beloved is not far. Both have a wine in them, and both find that the need survives the drinking. But the grammar of the two poems is opposite. Bidel’s marvel is addressed to the Beloved: you do not arrive. His line leaves the distance standing, as a wonder, and makes his poetry out of the wonder. Niyāz turns every one of its verbs back on the speaker. The reason the Beloved is not met is something the lover did, a supposition laid over a face, and the poem goes on to say what undid it. Bidel’s cup leaves him with khomār, the ache of wanting more. The wine of Niyāz is where its speaker swears his allegiance. The older poem is the perfect statement of the predicament. This one is an account of the way out, and the way out runs through thorn and chaff.
Francis Thompson’s “The Kingdom of God,” found among his papers after his death in 1907, is the best-known poem in English on the same predicament:
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
Point for point the two poems agree. Thompson’s fish that need not soar to find the ocean is the lover who may already be camped at Kowsar. His asking “of the stars in motion” is the supposition laid on the star. His “estrangèd faces” that miss the splendour are the be khod, the “by myself,” of the line about the truncated world. And his stone is the nearest thing in English poetry to khār o khāshāk: the lowly object at one’s foot, under which the wonder is.
The differences are the measure of Dr. Bemanian’s poem. Thompson’s lowly thing conceals; the stone is a lid, and the wing is under it. In Niyāz the lowly thing is not a lid over the marvel. It is the one that sings: thorn and chaff give the ghazal. Thompson speaks to others, “‘Tis ye,” in the voice of a preacher who has seen what his hearers have missed. Dr. Bemanian speaks of himself, eight times, in the voice of the one who missed it. And Thompson’s poem ends with rescue coming down, a ladder “pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.” This poem ends with an oath going up. Its speaker is not fetched. He gives his hand.
Read beside these two, the poem’s own place is clear. It shares Bidel’s knowledge that the Beloved is at one’s side, and it declines to leave that knowledge as a marvel. It shares Thompson’s conviction that the splendour is underfoot, and it gives the thing underfoot a voice.
IX. Conclusion
Niyāz and Reflection together describe one correction from two sides. The Persian shows it as a confession: a lover who held his meeting with himself, covered what he saw with what he supposed, cut the world to his own measure, and may all the while have been camped beside abundance; who woke among roses, took up the thorn with the flower, heard that the thorn was the singer, and then, with his eye open, swore allegiance under a star he no longer needed to interpret. The English shows it as a search with no one in it, moving through three failed ways of looking within until a dream takes hold of the looker and he begins to hear. Both texts place the turn in the same line and give it to the same witnesses, the lowest things in the poem.
Dr. Bemanian wrote Niyāz on June 18, 2017. It ends on the word bey’at, an oath of allegiance. One week later he wrote Ahd, “The Pledge,” whose first line speaks of coming to “another pledge” and whose second line ends on the word niyāz. The two poems hold each other’s titles. Niyāz is the poem of how a need learns where to look. Its last deed is the pledge that the next poem begins from.
X. Biography of the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, physicist, systems architect, and author whose bilingual practice pairs a compressed Persian original with an English companion that states what the original performs. In Niyāz the Persian discipline shows in the placing of single words: didār doubled in the first line so that the line is its own mirror, two words from one short chapter of the Qur’an set at the ends of neighboring lines, a refrain that means “I did,” and one line, the ninth, in which the verb is handed to someone else. The English companion answers with a rule of its own, twelve lines without an “I,” and with sixteen triads that name each error of perception exactly. Dr. Bemanian’s craft in both languages is the craft of someone who trusts structure to carry meaning. The reader is not told that the lover’s self has filled the poem. The word khod is simply there in each of the first three beyts, and then it is gone.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Artistic Appreciation
The Mirror and the Thorn in Reflection — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
Considered as a made thing, Reflection and its Persian original, Niyāz, show how much a poem can say through placement alone. Dr. Bemanian tells the reader very little outright. He sets words where they will do the telling.
The Persian Original: A Mirror, a Refrain, and One Borrowed Pair
The first line is built as its subject. The word didār, a meeting in which one beholds, stands in it twice with a single preposition between, so that the line about finding the Beloved within is itself a reflection. The refrain kardam, “I did,” then closes eight of the twelve hemistichs, and it closes all four lines of the first two beyts, a doubled opening that a ghazal does not ordinarily have. The effect is of a door shut four times before the poem lets any air in. At the center stand two words that belong together elsewhere: abtar, cut off, and Kowsar, abundance, the last and first key words of the shortest chapter of the Qur’an, set here at the ends of neighboring lines and in reverse order. A reader who hears them hears the poem’s whole argument in two rhymes.
The Line That Changes Hands
After eight lines of “I did,” the ninth says dahand, “they give.” It is the only verb in the poem that the speaker does not own, and its subject is thorn and chaff. Dr. Bemanian has saved the single change of grammatical subject for the humblest nouns in the poem, and he has made their gift the word ghazal. The line is a small act of authorship given away. It is also where the word bāz, which twice meant “again,” comes back beside the eye and means “open.”
The English Companion: Glimpses and Whispers
The English makes its music from two families of words. One is the family of small lights: “glimmer and gleam,” “glanced at,” “the awakening glimpse,” “the glimpse of your presence,” stars “glimmering.” The other is the family of low sounds: “Murmurings, purring, whisperings, and mutterings,” then “whispering,” then “the echo of soil and dirt whispers.” Nothing in it shines fully or speaks loudly. A poem about correcting an overconfident eye is written in half-lights and undertones, and its sixteen triads (“reflection, replication, and manifestation”; “capturing, seizing, and annexing”) give that quiet material a steady, ceremonial pace.
Two Stars
The poem’s frame is drawn with two stars. In the second beyt the star is something the lover supposes about, and the English puts it among the “idols.” In the last it is the star of fortune, and the English calls such stars “guiding.” The sky is the same. Between the two the lover has looked at the ground. The beauty of the construction is that the poem never says this. It simply shows the first star, the soil, and the second star, in that order.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Conversational Commentary
Reflection (Niyāz) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
If the formal analysis follows the refrain that means “I did,” and the philosophical analysis follows need as it is educated from lack into allegiance, a conversational reading of Reflection can start from an experience everyone has had: being sure of what someone is like, and being wrong.
The second beyt describes it with a single word, engār, supposition. We meet a person, a place, a piece of news, and before we have finished looking we have laid a picture over it. The English calls these pictures “idols of deterrence, preemption, and preclusion,” which is a precise way of saying that a ready-made image gets there first and keeps the real thing out. The poem’s claim is that we do this to the whole world, and to whatever we hold most sacred, and that the world comes out smaller for it.
Here the poet’s own training shows. Dr. Bemanian is a physicist and a systems architect, and no physicist forgets that an instrument colors what it measures. The English speaks his working language: a “perceived portrayal” that is “imprecise and blurred,” “premises and presumptions” that fail at “discerning and distinguishing.” This is a lab notebook’s honesty applied to the heart. The reading was off, and the fault was in the apparatus.
And then the poem does something no lab manual would. It says the correction arrives from the least regarded quarter. Thorn and chaff, soil and dirt, give the flower its love song. I take this as practical advice as much as mysticism. The things we sweep aside, the difficulty we wish were gone, the plain ground that holds everything up, usually know something our bright ideas do not. The poem’s word for the thorn is khār-e del, the thorn of the heart. It is our own.
There is a line in the middle that I find the most generous in the poem. “We do not know,” it says, whether the tent was already pitched at Kowsar, the river whose name means abundance. It is the only “we” in the Persian. For that one line the poet steps out of his private confession and stands with the rest of us, thirsty, possibly at the water’s edge, and unsure. The poem ends in a pledge. It gets there by admitting that.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.
Reader Impression
Reflection (Niyāz) — Dr. Alireza Bemanian
I came to Reflection expecting the familiar comfort of the inward turn: look within, and there the Beloved is. The first line seems to promise it. By the fourth I understood that the poem had something harder to say. Looking within is where the trouble starts. The lover looks, supposes, and the picture comes out “imprecise and blurred.” Worse, he has cut “the vastness and immensity of the celestial cosmos” down to the size of his own guess.
What held me was that he blames no one. Every other line of the Persian ends on the same word, kardam, “I did,” and after a while the repetition stops sounding like rhyme and starts sounding like a man going through his own accounts. I did this. I did this too. There is no veil in the poem, no cruel fate, no distant Beloved. There is only what he did with what he was shown.
Then comes the line I have not been able to put down. In a poem full of stars and sacred rivers, the love song is handed out by the sweepings of the garden: khār o khāshāk, thorn and chaff. The English says it even more plainly: “The soil and dirt are the messengers and revealers of love songs to lavender flowers.” I read that sentence several times. It is not telling me to be humble. It is telling me where the song comes from, and that I had been looking over its head.
The English never says “I,” and I noticed it only at the end, when I went back to see who had been searching all this time. No one, grammatically. “Searching within,” it says, three times, and the searcher is never in the sentence. He is found only when something finds him: “The dream of you capturing, seizing, and annexing my thoughts.” What Dr. Bemanian leaves a reader with is a strange and steadying thought. One can be camped beside the water and still be thirsty, and the cure is not a longer journey. It is to listen to what is underfoot.
© 2017-2026 www.bemanian.com — Dr. Alireza Bemanian. All rights reserved.