![]() Lines 69-72: “than rubble / than bone / than your child's body / in pieces.Lines 65-66: “than fourteen men between / your legs” All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun.Lines 49-52: “blacks / refugees / dirty immigrants / asylum seekers”.Lines 45-47: “no one could take it / no one could stomach it / no one skin would be tough enough”.Line 35: “no one chooses refugee camps”.Line 29: “no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck”.Line 25: “unless the water is safer than the land”.Line 24: “no one puts their children in a boat”.Line 12: “no one leaves home,” “unless home chases you”.Lines 1-2: “unless / home is the mouth of a shark”.Line 89: “home is a sweaty voice in your ear” In the tradition of men in my blood, you come home at 3 a.m.Lines 78-82: “home told you / to quicken your legs / leave your clothes behind / crawl through the desert / wade through the oceans” 148 quotes from Warsan Shire: 'Perhaps, the problem is not the intensity of your love, but the quality of the people you are loving.', 'Loving you was like going to war I never came back the same.', and 'for the fifth time this month you say you’re going to leave him he calls you a cunt over the phone then walks the three miles to your house and kisses your mouth until the word is just a.Line 77: “home chased you to the shore”.Lines 74-75: “home is the mouth of a shark / home is the barrel of the gun”.Lines 69-72: “than rubble / than bone / than your child's body / in pieces.”.Lines 65-66: “fourteen men between / your legs”.Lines 43-44: “a truckload / of men who look like your father”.Lines 36-37: “strip searches where your / body is left aching”.Lines 29-30: “days and nights in the stomach of a truck / feeding on newspaper”.Lines 26-28: “burns their palms / under trains / beneath carriages”.Lines 18-22: “carried the anthem under / your breath / only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet / sobbing as each mouthful of paper / made it clear that you would not be going back.”.Lines 16-17: “the blade burnt threats into / your neck”.Lines 12-14: “home chases you / fire under feet / hot blood in your belly”.Lines 7-9: “the boy you went to school with / who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory / is holding a gun bigger than his body”.Lines 3-6: “you only run for the border / when you see the whole city running as well / your neighbors running faster than you / breath bloody in their throats”.Lines 55-57: “smell strange / savage / messed” No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running.Lines 52-53: “asylum seekers / sucking”.Line 20: “tearing up,” “passport,” “airport toilet”.Line 6: “breath bloody,” “their throats”.But that is not to say that her work is shallow or simply the sum total of catchy sound bites. She writes with an immediacy, clarity and candour that will likely chime well with people on social media. ![]() Shire used to publish her poems online, rose to prominence through the microblogging platform Tumblr and collaborated with pop star Beyonce on her 2016 visual album Lemonade. And it demands to be spoken as well as read. It is powerful because it cuts close to the bone. This is poetry that has no patience for the obscure and no time to wrap itself in allusions. A few lines later, "Mum's body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place". Events rewind like a film in reverse with the now-departed father "walking backwards into a room". ![]() Then there is Backwards, an exercise in wishful thinking. She is now, in Shire's imagination, "rewarded with 72 devoted mothers who delicately dry her small body with wool softer than skin". Shire draws heavily on the personal as well, invoking her hooyo ("mother" in Somali) and her late friend Yosra.Īnother poem was inspired by the real-life case of an Ivorian child who was tortured and murdered in a London flat.
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