Free Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire Page A

wedding night was a battlefield.
    A Swiss knife, his young bride,
    his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.
     
    His face is a photograph left out in the sun,
    the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows
    the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.
     
    Your grandfather is dying.
    He begs you Take me home yaqay,
    I just want to see it one last time;
    you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be
    anything like the way he left it.
     
     

My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched
     
     
     
     
     
    My wife is a ship docking from war.
    The doctor maps out her body in ink,
    holding up her breast with two fingers, explains
    what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep
    the nipple. Her body is a flooding home.
    We are afraid. We want to know
    what the water will take away from us,
    what the earth will claim as its own.
    I lick my lips and she looks at the floor.
     
    Later, at home, she calls her sister.
    They talk about curses, the evil eye, their aunt
    who drowned, all the money they need
    to send back. It is morning when she comes to bed
    and lets me touch her. I am like a thirsty child
    against her chest, her skin
    is parchment, dry and cracking.
     
    My wife sits on the hospital bed.
    Gown and body together: 41 kilos.
    She is a boat docking in from war,
    her body, a burning village, a prison
    with open gates. She won’t let me hold her
    now, when she needs it most.
     
    We stare at the small television in the corner of the room.
    I think of all the images she must carry in her body,
    how the memory hardens into a tumour.
    Apathy 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.

Ugly 
     
     
     
     
     
    Your daughter is ugly.
    She knows loss intimately,
    carries whole cities in her belly.
     
    As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
    She was splintered wood and sea water.
    She reminded them of the war.
      
    On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
    how to tie her hair like rope 
    and smoke it over burning frankincense.
     
    You made her gargle rosewater
    and while she coughed, said
    macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
    of lonely or empty .
     
    You are her mother.
    Why did you not warn her,
    hold her like a rotting boat
    and tell her that men will not love her
    if she is covered in continents,
    if her teeth are small colonies,
    if her stomach is an island
    if her thighs are borders?
     
    What man wants to lie down 
    and watch the world burn 
    in his bedroom? 
     
    Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
    her hands are a civil war,
    a refugee camp behind each ear,
    a body littered with ugly things.
     
    But God, 
    doesn’t she wear
    the world well?
     

Tea With Our Grandmothers
     
     
     
     
     
    The morning your habooba died 
    I thought of my ayeeyo, the woman
    I was named after, Warsan Baraka,
    skin dark like tamarind flesh, 
    who died grinding cardamom
    waiting for her sons to come home and
    raise the loneliness they’d left behind;
     
    or my mother’s mother, Noura
    with the honeyed laugh, who
    broke cinnamon barks between
    her palms, nursing her husband’s
    stroke, her sister’s cancer and
    her own bad back with broken
    Swahili and stubborn Italian;
     
    and Doris, the mother of your
    English rose, named after
    the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys
    the Welsh in your blood, from the land
    of Cymry, your grandmother who
    dreams of clotted cream  in her tea
    through the swell of diabetes;
     
    then your habooba Al-Sura, 
    God keep her, with three lines on
    each cheek, a tally of surviving,
    the woman who cooled your tea
    pouring it like the weight of deeds 
    between bowl and cup, until the steam
    would rise like a ghost.
     

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

     
     

Notes
     
    Surah Al Baqarah — A chapter in the Qu’ran, used to ward off evil.
    Habooba — Arabic word meaning beloved woman,