Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems

by Warsan Shire

Mama, I made it out of your home alive, raised by the voices in my head.

I can’t get the refugee out of my body, I bolt my body whenever I get the chance. How many pills does it take to fall asleep? How many to meet the dead?

You only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land. No one would choose days and nights in the stomach of a truck, unless the miles traveled meant something more than journey.

No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere.

I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying—leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.

bless this child born on sorrow’s palm.

So few will want to lay down and watch the world burn from their bedroom.

Bless the soft interior of boys, velvet darkness expanding, fading into smoke.

Calcifying her one human body, staying for the sake of the kids, then staying for the sake of staying, enduring, abstaining, waiting for the angel of death.

When the body remembers, it bucks wildly. When we try to heal, the phantom smell returns. While in the shower, you break down. While you wash your body you realize it is not your body. And at the same time, it is the only body you have.

white clouds are punctured by a white god stretching his white arm from out a white sky,

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women. Sometimes, the men—they come with keys, and sometimes, the men—they come with hammers.

I point to my body and say Oh, this old thing? No, I just slipped it on.

The bigger my body is, the more locked rooms I find. The more men queue at the door.

Show us on the doll where you were touched, they said. I said I didn’t look like a doll, I looked more like a house. They said Show us on the house. Like this: two fingers down the drain. Like this: a fist through the drywall.

Maybe he’s met the others—males missing from cities or small towns and pleasant mothers, who tricked and forced their way in.

At parties I point to my body and say Oh, this old thing? This is where men come to die.

Bitches’ Hysteria the men called it. Natural response the women named it.

Hooyo says no one can fight it— the body returning to God, if it must, your body will leave without you.

through there will be no love that’s dying here—his voice, and how it soothes you from beyond the distant wall of this maybe womb, the faint rhythm of a larger heart above.

Our lady of uncomfortable silences, Dame Grace Jones, your daughters (damn their insomnia) turn in their dreamless sleep, a legion of women flinching at touch. Fortify them.

We lay our burdens at your feet, careful not to weigh you down, from you, we are learning to put ourselves first.