Many stories treat coming home as the happy ending. Leila Cankaya's "Faraways" treats it as the most dangerous moment of all. The poem follows someone through hostile distant places and frantic attempts to survive, then back to safety, where the real threat appears: nothing happens. Its central idea is uncomfortable but recognisable. Struggle, even when it nearly destroys you, gives life a shape, and the calm that follows can feel like a slow kind of dying.
The title already bends the language. "Faraway" is normally an adjective, but here it becomes a plural noun, as if these remote places were a category on a private map, each different and all alike in what they do to you. The poem begins by addressing "you" and names the damage at once: "Nature conditions destroy you." The phrase is ambiguous. It can mean natural conditions, but "conditions" also sounds like a verb, as though nature were training you before it breaks you. Then the forces pile up in short fragments: it "shakes your body", then "a harsh wind", then "someone, who cold looked like ice." The list slides from weather to a person without changing tone, which suggests that human coldness is simply another climate to survive. The grammar is chilly too. "Cold" sits where we expect "coldly", so the coldness seems fused to the person's appearance.
Then "I" arrives. After the distancing "you", the speaker steps forward: "Sometimes, I would throw myself to streets / Like mad." The earlier "you" may have been a way of holding the experience at arm's length. "Like mad" gets its own line, abrupt and unexplained. A few lines later "Sometimes..." returns, trailing into an ellipsis, and now the speaker would "shelter to the shadow of a tree". Recklessness and retreat share the same word, so the speaker swings between them with no pattern.
The tree matters more than it first seems. The shade of one tree becomes "the branch / Of the life tree", and the goal is "to catch a dream" and "to hang again" onto life. The old-fashioned "For to" has the ring of a folk saying or a prayer, a small dignity amid the chaos. The verb "hang" means to cling on, but it can't help brushing against a darker meaning. The poem doesn't press this, but it prepares the ending, where life and death are already close neighbours.
The turn comes quietly. "And finally you stay.exhausted." The missing space after the full stop jams "exhausted" against the sentence before it, so the word gets no room to breathe. If that is deliberate, it is a neat way of putting fatigue on the page. Then "you go back home", and "This time" is left alone on its line like a held breath. What follows is the poem's strangest word: "easiness". It is not "peace" or "relief" but a flat, almost clinical noun, and it begins "Without reason", as if comfort had arrived from nowhere and could not be trusted.
The last two lines reverse everything: "You can die this time / Cause of boredom." Where wind and ice once attacked, now nothing attacks at all. The verb "can" is striking, because death is not threatened but made available, almost like permission. And the casual "Cause" drops the register to a shrug. The grand image of the life tree collapses into the voice of someone too weary to say "because" in full, and that deflation is the point.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its rhythm comes from white space. Many stanzas are a single line, so the reader keeps stopping, and the poem thins out near the end. The English also bends in places ("shelter to the shadow", "hang again to the branch"). Whatever the reason, that slight strangeness suits a poem about being out of place, abroad and at home alike.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of comfort. It suggests that being safe and being alive are not the same thing, and that boredom, usually a trivial complaint, can be as serious as a storm.