Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

by Warsan Shire

waiting to grow into our hunger.

Every teenage girl. So angsty haha.

daring her to look at me and give me what I had not lost: a name.

You were a city exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.

Wow. I know this is about leaving home and being a refugee - but wow. I do not know where I am going. My beauty is not beauty here. The shame of not belonging. This is leaving anything - church for me.

She is a boat docking in from war, her body, a burning village, a prison with open gates.

She was splintered wood and sea water.

But God, doesn’t she wear the world well?

To my daughter I will say, ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥