Poet’s Statement: Over the past few months, my parents’ home country of Lebanon has undergone war resulting in devastating loss. I was born and raised in Quebec, but the vivid memories I’ve spent in Lebanon with my family every summer are ones that will never leave me. Being so far away from the country, I felt as though this loss was not one I was allowed to mourn. I’d never lived there, but nonetheless Lebanon shaped my identity. Through this poem, I allowed myself to grieve the losses my country faced along with the loss of a piece of me.
"We've reached the end of the world,"
You lied.
"We have."
On the edge of concrete.
We stood before a view of mountains.
If only we knew back then.
If only you hadn't lied to me so blatantly.
I forgave you.
Your intentions were pure.
Innocent.
Do you believe that innocence dies with age too,
Fleeting away with the wind,
Dwindling like the sunset before us?
It's no wonder I've looked back at you ever since.
Hoping you'd look back at me and say,
"We reached the end,"
Once again.
Instead, I've been chasing the sun since that day
In hopes to rekindle the fire in my soul.
The one they stole from me,
the things they've stolen from us.
We'll never get them back.
I'll never see that view again.
And when faced with the end—an ending I'll never be able to claim as my own
I'll crumble down like the concrete on the edge of the world.
The end of a world where I could proudly look at the view in front of me and claim it as my own.
What else have they stolen from you?
Along with your future,
What more can they take?
You made me read those poems to you
And when you stopped abruptly to ask me
What would become of our country,
I choked like a kettle being cut off from the heat of a stove.
And lied through my teeth.
I said,
No matter what they've taken from you
They'll never take your right to claim who you are.
Don't forget your roots,
The soil you're so deeply grounded in.
I wish I could read my poems to you.
I wish you could've been there to see that view.
"We've reached the end of the world"
Lynne Zreik doesn’t know how to describe herself. She is constantly changing, but one thing she knows for certain: writing is something that she can’t live without. It has become her way to get her point across and convey her feelings unapologetically, whether that be through song or poetry.