Nobody in Leila Cankaya's «Between of Ruins» walks steadily. The speaker is "tripping" through wreckage, pushed around by winds that cannot make up their minds. By the end they have lost more than the way: they have lost the categories by which a way is judged. "Where is paradise where's hell." The central idea is disorientation, outer ruin turning into inner ruin until salvation and damnation can no longer be told apart.
The opening line comes back almost word for word in the middle of the poem, and the small change matters. The second time it is followed by "Outside blowing undecided winds." That one word, "Outside," quietly separates the weather from the speaker's mind, and "undecided" then bridges the two. The wind stops and starts "again," offering no direction to follow, and its indecision is the speaker's own, projected onto the air. The grammar adds to this. "It stopping and blowing again" has no helping verb, so the action hangs in a continuous present and never finishes. The same goes for phrases like "between of ruins" and "It cannot talking." Whatever their source, these bent constructions make the language stumble in step with the speaker.
The crow is the poem's one sharp moment of drama. "Screaming on my head a crow" puts the bird right on top of the speaker, and the inverted word order makes it arrive like a shock. Then comes a question that cannot be settled: does the crow "call my disaster? Or, / Warning me..." The difference is practical. A prophecy of doom can only be endured, while a warning can be acted on. The speaker cannot tell which this is, because the crow "cannot talking," so the sign has no translation. The next line, "How can I know?.", jams a question mark against a full stop, as though the question is asked and shut down in the same breath.
After the crow's scream, the street joins in. It "has been singing its song / With pell-mell," a pleasant verb for a chaotic sound. The world is full of voices, a screaming bird and a singing street, and none of them can be read. Then comes the shortest line in the poem: "Dustbins full." There is no verb and no comment, just a bare image of waste. Set beside the next lines, it turns bitter: "How many people even eats / All the same hungry soul.." The sentence can be read more than one way. Perhaps few people eat at all, or perhaps even those who do eat share the same hunger. Either way, the hunger has moved from the stomach to the soul, and full bins cannot answer it.
The last third turns from the world to the self. "First where from / Had I begun to travel?" twists its syntax so that the question of origin feels hard to get hold of. "How many days" stands alone, unfinished, then stretches to "months, maybe years," and the counting loses its footing. Even the word "know" breaks apart on the page ("kn ow"), a tiny typographical stumble that enacts the failure it describes. The speaker then says it cleanly, "I don't know anymore," as if steadying themselves before the closing line. That line has no question mark. It squeezes "paradise" and "hell" into one breath and even shifts from "is" to "where's," so the two places blur, and the grammar itself seems to lose its footing.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its stanzas are short and uneven, broken up by double dots and white space. The rhythm is halting on purpose, closer to a stumble than a stride, and the silences between fragments do as much work as the words.
Its significance lies in what it refuses to do. The poem never says what the ruins are, whether war, grief, or something less nameable. That openness lets readers bring their own wreckage to it. It also offers no consolation, ending in not-knowing rather than a lesson. For a student reader, it shows how a poem can make confusion felt rather than explained, through broken grammar, unreadable signs, and a closing line that cannot find its question mark.