Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.
Warsan ShireI 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.
Warsan ShireIโm not sad, but the boys who are looking for sad girls always find me. Iโm not a girl anymore and Iโm not sad anymore. You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say โWow, isn't he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?โ You think Iโll be the dark sky so you can be the star? Iโll swallow you whole.
Warsan ShireApathy 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.
Warsan Shire