A person sits by a window at night, watches the dark and the rain, and wishes to be anywhere else. That small, familiar scene is the whole of Ali Tarik Tunc's "far away", and its central idea is a longing that never becomes an action. The speaker says "I wish" twice and "I could be" twice, but nothing in the poem moves except the weather and the cars outside. The place the speaker wants to reach is never named. It is only "far away", and the poem's quiet strength comes from leaving that distance undefined.
The opening line, "There I go again," tells us this has happened before. It sounds like someone catching themselves in a habit, half-amused and half-weary, and it makes the staring at the "endless black sky" a routine rather than a single bad evening. The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and short, plain lines. But the sound of one word holds it together. The first stanza ends on "Hoping my tears will go away," and from then on "away" keeps returning at line endings. The speaker first wants the sadness to go away, then wants to go away themself. The poem never decides which wish matters more, and neither is granted.
The shape on the page also carries meaning. The stanzas run three, four, three, five and six lines. The poem begins in brief, hesitant bursts and ends in a long final stanza that piles up its images of cars, distance and wishing, as if the longing keeps gathering weight with no outlet.
The imagery works through the senses of touch and temperature. The "chill from the open window" is not just cold air. It "reminds" the speaker "of the far away," as though the outside world carries a message from somewhere else. The line break after "Reminding me of" is deliberate. It leaves the phrase hanging for a beat, then delivers "The far away" as a noun, almost a place or a person. Later the phrase changes grammatically: it becomes a location ("Far away from where I am"), then a direction ("Slowly getting far away"), and finally an intensified wish ("far far away"). The repetition reads like a mind circling the same thought and pushing it a little harder each time.
The rain is the most interesting image. It is "slowly pouring," "peeking" through "the small gap between the windows," and it "caresses my face." These are gentle, almost human verbs. Then comes the strangest detail: the rain is "almost asking for help." Nothing in the scene actually asks for help except the speaker, so the poem seems to hand its own need to the weather. The rain on the face also blurs with the tears from the first stanza, so we cannot tell which is which. There is a small tension in the setting too. The window is "open," yet the rain comes through a "small gap." The speaker is not fully shut in or fully free, only connected to the outside through a narrow opening, which suits the mood of the poem.
The ending turns on a quiet irony. The speaker watches cars "driving by, / Slowly getting far away," and wishes to "be inside." Earlier, "inside" was the place the cold and rain invaded. Now it is the interior of a moving car, an inside that leads somewhere. "Slowly" has also appeared twice, for the rain and then for the cars, so time seems to drag. Everything around the speaker is leaving at a patient pace, and they are left behind to watch. The poem stops on the wish itself, "To go far far away," without any sense of arrival or relief.
The poem's significance lies in its plainness. It gives no names, places or reasons, so a reader can fill the distance with their own: a person, a city, an earlier time, or simply a different version of life. Readers may hear homesickness or loneliness, but the text only supports a general ache, and that openness is what makes it easy to share. For students, it shows how much a poem can do with a window, some rain, a few passing cars and one repeated phrase.