what they did yesterday afternoon by Warsan Shire
what they did yesterday afternoon
Warsan Shirethey set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who used to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
MARGINALIA
1.
How did you know, R. asked me. He said, I didn’t know how to love the first time. I said I was in the middle of a conversation one day, and then suddenly the realisation hit me and my face went askew, my heart started beating so fast I thought I was having a panic attack.
2.
How did you survive, J. asked me. She said, I don’t think I could have made it out alive, all those years of abuse. Inner strength, I joked, while in my mind I thought: because something inside me refused to die.
3.
How can you live in this country, D. asked me. I opened my mouth to answer then closed it again. He will never understand what it means to be brown.
4.
Maybe it was a panic attack.
5.
I loved and it hurt everywhere.
ABOUT WARSAN SHIRE
Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She has written two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning
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ENDNOTES
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Nikola
Thank you for this. Keep refusing to die. We just gotta trudge along, no matter how hard.