Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

by Warsan Shire

I think of all the images she must carry in her body, how the memory hardens into a tumour. Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.

You are her mother. Why did you not warn her, hold her like a rotting boat and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered in continents, if her teeth are small colonies, if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders? What man wants to lie down and watch the world burn in his bedroom?

the woman I was named after, Warsan Baraka, skin dark like tamarind flesh, who died grinding cardamom waiting for her sons to come home and raise the loneliness they’d left behind;