Everyone knows the phrase about the light at the end of the tunnel. samia's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, quotes that comfort in its second line and then calmly takes it apart. The tunnel, the speaker insists, never ends, because "the tunnel is everything that is." What unsettles us is not the darkness itself but what the people inside it do with it. They are happy.
The opening line, "The answer is always the same," drops us into the middle of a conversation. We never hear the question, only the weariness of the reply. Then come the reassurances: "They tell you the tunnel is eventual." "Eventual" is a stiff, slightly bureaucratic word, as if the consolation were being read off a leaflet. The next line makes talk cheap with its doubled verbs, "said and told," and then the voice turns flat and almost shrugging: "It's all just a great mistake." That small word "just" keeps coming back ("just the tunnel," "just dust"), along with "Only an illusion." The poem's vocabulary deflates things, and its calm tone makes the claims feel final.
The most interesting move is the reversal. We expect the tunnel to be the illusion and the world outside to be real. The speaker flips this: it is "life outside the tunnel" that is the illusion. The list that follows, "The wind, the sea, the flowers, the free," is a fragment with no verb, like an inventory of things lost. Its last item is odd. "The free" turns an adjective into a noun and sets freedom among physical objects, as if it were scenery.
The pronouns shift as well. At first "they" are the comforters talking to "you." Later "they" are the inhabitants who "feel lucky and loved and blessed," and "you" drops out. The poem moves from being addressed to watching. The text never says whether the speaker stands outside this contentment or is trapped in it, unable to share the others' ease.
The second half of the poem is a tour through the senses, and each sense gets a counterfeit. Touch and sight: "They enjoy the concrete, taking it for rocks on the beach." Smell: sweet scents in "air that / has no odor at all," where the line break leaves the sentence hanging on "that" before it arrives at nothing. Hearing: "The dull echo of steps that were never even taken / sounds like lovely music." Here even the walking is imaginary, so the echo has no cause at all. Sight: "fireflies in the dark" that are really "dust in the air." The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its uneven, near-prose lines let the images pile up like a matter-of-fact list, and the lack of music makes the "lovely music" sound hollower still.
The fireflies are the poem's cruellest and tenderest touch. They are the tunnel's own small lights, the nearest these people get to the promised ending. The poem never sneers at them, either. "Lovely" appears without quotation marks, and the phrase "the people are happy anyway" hangs on its last word. Two readings seem possible, and the poem supports both. One sees a numbed society that accepts concrete for beaches and no longer notices. The other, judging by the imagery, hears someone in a long bleak stretch being told "it will pass," who finds the advice empty yet cannot quite deny the contentment around them.
The ending offers no way out. The final image of dust returns to the word "air," so the poem circles back to where its smells began, and the stumble of "all there is, is just dust" sounds like a speaker pressing down on an unwelcome fact. Nothing is known here about when or why samia wrote it, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it does.
Its significance lies in that stubborn inversion. A familiar cliché promises relief, and the poem refuses it and then asks a harder question: if a person feels lucky and loved, does it matter that the beach is concrete? The poem does not answer, and that is why it stays with the reader.