Leila Cankaya's "Did We Live" is built around a question it refuses to answer, and that refusal is the point. The poem suggests that a life can pass so smoothly, so much by routine, that looking back we cannot be sure it was lived at all. The speaker says "we" throughout, never "I", so the doubt belongs to a whole group of people, not one troubled individual.
The river does most of the work. It first appears in the line "Near the river, / like flowing time," where the grammar slides from place to comparison. The people are beside the water, and then they are like it. By the second stanza the image has hardened: "in the border of the society / like flowing river / routine, calmer." Time has become a river, and the river has become a way of existing. The image is double-edged. A river is always moving, yet it moves along a course it did not choose and cannot leave. The poem seems to use that paradox to describe motion without direction, a life that goes on without ever going anywhere. The phrase "routine, calmer" supports this. "Calmer" has no "than" after it, so we are never told what the calm is measured against. Judging by the imagery, it is not peace but the quiet of something that has stopped resisting.
The single word "hopeless" gets a stanza to itself, and the next line breaks off: "we..." The ellipsis is the most telling moment in the poem. A verb should follow "we", and the obvious one, "lived", is exactly what the poem cannot bring itself to say. The syntax fails where the speaker's confidence fails.
There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and spaced out, so the silence between them carries weight. The repeated "Did we live?" does the job rhyme might have done, returning like a pulse and holding the poem together. A faint sound echo appears in the last two stanzas, where "society" and "reality" share an *-ity* ending. Whether or not it is deliberate, it links the two ideas: the social world the speakers sit on the edge of, and the truth nobody will name. The phrase "in the border" is slightly unusual, since we would expect "on the edge" or "at the margin." Read closely, "in" makes the border feel like a place you are stuck inside, not a line you could step across.
The last stanza changes the poem's mood. Questions give way to demands: "Somebody should say the reality. / Somebody must say it." The move from "should" to "must" is a small escalation, from opinion to urgency. But "somebody" is never named, and the speaker does not volunteer. There is a quiet irony here, because the poem so far has only asked and not asserted. Perhaps the poem is the speaker's attempt to say it, or perhaps it shows how hard it is to be the one who speaks. The word "the reality" also deserves notice. The definite article implies a single, known truth that everyone is avoiding.
The ending returns to the opening question with small changes: "did we live indeed?" The lowercase "did" makes it sound quieter, almost muttered. "Indeed" adds a note of insistence, as if the speaker is no longer wondering aloud but pressing for a verdict. The question has not been answered, but it has become harder to ignore.
The poem is significant for its economy. In under thirty lines it manages an image, a mood, a collapse of syntax and a call to action, without lecturing or offering comfort. It also speaks to a worry that readers of any age will recognise: that being busy, calm and carried along is not the same as living. It leaves the answer to us, which is a risky thing for a poem to do, and the reason it lingers.