Ndrek Gjini’s spare lyric turns sleeplessness into a small, fierce drama. The opening denial, “My eyes are not like doors / to just close and sleep,” rejects the idea that rest is a simple mechanical act. A door can be pulled shut; the speaker’s eyes cannot. Almost immediately the poem replaces that domestic image with something more turbulent: “A ruthless rebel is my yearning.” The word “ruthless” makes yearning sound less like nostalgia and more like an adversary, and “desperately keeps fighting with my past” deepens the conflict. The struggle is not merely against the past but with it, as if the speaker is locked in an intimate, ongoing battle that cannot be laid aside at night. At its core, the poem argues that grief and longing cannot be shut out by an act of will; the inner life keeps watch even when the body needs rest.
The poem’s movement mirrors the failure of sleep. After those short, declarative sentences, the speaker says, “I close my eyes to welcome sleep,” a phrase full of gentleness and intention. But the sentence does not end there; it spills into a longer, winding passage: “yet unconsciously / the pale face of the moon / and that of my mothers / in the agony of her death, / walk the alleys of my memory.” The shift from “I close” to “yet unconsciously” shows that control slips exactly at the threshold of rest. The moon’s pale face is doubled by the mother’s face, so that the natural world and personal grief become one ghostly presence. “Pale” connects the two faces through the colour of death and night, while “agony of her death” is deliberately unsoftened; the mother is not remembered as peacefully sleeping but in pain, and that rawness is what keeps the speaker alert. The word “alleys” also matters: memory is not a wide, orderly avenue but a tangle of narrow, shadowed passageways through which the dead can wander.
Gjini’s form is free verse, unrhymed, yet it has a strong rhythmic logic. The first two lines are short and blunt, matching the speaker’s wish to close things off. The middle sentence is the longest in the poem, and its enjambment—“walk the alleys of my memory”—forces the eye and the voice to keep moving, just as the memories keep moving through the mind. Then the poem collapses into three fragment-like units: “Slowly. In silence. Keeping me awake.” The full stops after “Slowly” and “in silence” make the reader pause, imitating the slow, insistent pressure of the remembered faces. “Keeping me awake” dangles as an open-ended present participle, so the wakefulness seems to continue beyond the poem’s last line. The repeated -ing forms in “yearning,” “fighting,” and “keeping” reinforce the sense of ongoing, unfinished action. There is no neat closure because the speaker has not found rest.
What makes the lyric significant is its refusal to present grief as something to be healed or resolved. It honours the part of the mind that will not be quiet, that keeps “fighting with my past” even when the body wants to sleep. The word “rebel” matters because it gives dignity to that unrest: the speaker’s yearning is not a weakness but a form of resistance. The final image is not consolation but endurance—awake, alone, accompanied by the pale faces that memory will not let go. The speaker never says exactly what the yearning wants, whether to recover the mother, to undo the past, or simply to keep remembering, and that uncertainty is part of the poem’s power. It is a truthful portrait of mourning’s nighttime hours, and it gives the short poem a weight far beyond its size.