A crow screams overhead, and the speaker of Leila Cankaya's untitled poem cannot tell whether it is cursing her or warning her. That uncertainty drives the whole text. The poem follows someone walking through ruins who has lost the usual ways of measuring a journey: where it began, how long it has lasted, and finally which way is good and which is damned. Its central idea is that disorientation can be total, affecting a person's sense of time and morality as well as her sense of place.
The construction is circular. The first stanza opens with "I am wandering between the ruins" and repeats the line almost exactly in its sixth line, so the speaker is caught in a loop. The wind lines work the same way. "Unstable winds stop and blow again" returns at the end as "It blows outside, undecided winds," with the words turned around. The wind is "unstable" and "undecided," adjectives that belong more naturally to a person, so the weather seems to share the speaker's inner state. Nothing in the poem says what made the ruins, and that silence helps. They could be a bombed city or a collapsed life, and the poem never chooses between them.
The crow is the most dramatic image, and the poem handles it with unusual honesty. Crows are traditional omens, but the speaker doesn't claim to read the bird's meaning. She asks, "Is it calling my disaster, or warns me?" and then undercuts herself: "It cannot talk that, how can I know?" Here the poem's one clear rhyme appears, "crow" and "know," at the point where knowledge fails. The sound closes neatly while the sense stays open.
The second stanza turns from sky to street, and the rhythm falls apart. "The street is singing its own song / in a pell-smell..." Whether deliberate or a slip, "pell-smell" seems to fuse "pell-mell" (confusion) with "smell," which suits overflowing bins. The street sings, but its song is clutter and rot. Then the syntax breaks: "Trash cans full. / Doesn't matter how much eats / Human even if, / though hungry soul." The sentence can be pieced together: however much a human eats, the soul stays hungry. Because the grammar is fractured, the line enacts that emptiness. The abundance in the trash cans only makes the hunger more pointed, since there is waste on every side and still no nourishment.
The last stanza moves from the outer world to the speaker's mind, and its questions come in a widening series: "Where, did I start the journey? / How many days? / How many months? maybe year..." The units grow from days to months to a single, trailing "year," as if she lost count and gave up. Notice also that the poem's opening word was "wandering," which has no destination, while here she speaks of a "journey," which implies one. She seems to have forgotten that the walk was supposed to lead somewhere. The mirrored lines "Anymore I don't know / I don't know anymore" echo the reversed wind lines in the first stanza. Then comes the ending: "Where's paradise, where's hell." There is no question mark and no return to the refrain. The poem simply stops, with the speaker unable to tell reward from punishment.
The English has an unidiomatic, halting quality ("calling my disaster," "Anymore I don't know"), and it suits the subject. The lines are short and uneven, there is no regular meter, and the sentences stumble and double back. A smoother poem would suggest a speaker who has already made sense of her situation, and this one hasn't.
The poem is worth reading for that refusal of comfort. It does not offer a lesson or a rescue, and it doesn't pretend the crow's cry can be decoded. Its small, concrete images do the work instead: a screaming bird, a wind that cannot make up its mind, a street full of rubbish, a soul still hungry after eating. Together they show how a person can stay alive and moving while no longer knowing what her movement means.