This paper examines the various ways in which Lebanese writers and poets fashioned an aesthetic response to decades of war in the region by drawing on the classical Arabic literary tradition of “stopping by the ruins”, namely "w?q?f ‘ala al-atl?l". Known as the “Poets of the South” or shu‘ar?’ al-jan?b, this relatively new school of Lebanese poets is credited with giving voice to an underrepresented part of the nation. In an attempt to find a language of memory distinct from dominant recollective modes of urban writers, this new school of poetry proposed alternative memories stemming from the southern borderland. South Lebanon is a rich place to explore the continuous unfolding of silenced memories as it existed in a state of exception for the larger part of its existence. Although the “Poets of the South” culled their commemorative language from the classical poetic tradition, their poetry, as exemplified by Abbas Beydoun’s “Tyre”, effectively transforms tradition to reflect a contemporary wartime environment. The modern poetic voice thus exploits the custom of “stopping by the ruins” to mourn a war-torn past instead of the idyllic loss of the classical qasida. As the modern literary voice tarries over his ruined abode, his memory is stirred by nightmarish recollections instead of amorous pasts. Elias Khoury’s novel Yalo, for example, posits its eponymous protagonist Yalo as a living ruin of war. Through this living war ruin, Khoury invites us to contemplate Lebanon’s conflicted past by casting a critical eye on the internal ills that produced the Everyman of war. I will show how each of the works I engage adapts the "atlal" motif to engage its contemporary wartime context. I argue that ruins, real and imagined, traditional and modern, create a productive tension that underlies the modern memorial poetics of Lebanon. The overarching connection between these genres is their common use of the classical ruins motif to open different portals onto Lebanon’s pasts.