Photograph by Matteo Paganelli @matteopaga

I had the privilege to see Somali-British poet Warsan Shire at the 55th International Poetry Festival 2025 in Rotterdam. She shared this poem in her reading. Powerful, indictment, manifesto, reality, rally, war-cry. This poem is all of these things and more. Please don’t look away.

HOME

I

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 as well. The
boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin
factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body. You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

No one would leave home unless home chased you. It’s not
something you ever thought about doing, so when you did, you
carried the anthem under your breath, waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow, each mournful mouthful making
it clear you would not be going back.

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 travelled meant something more than journey.

No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your
shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker,
drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied.
No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year
or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And
if you were to survive, greeted on the other side— Go home Blacks,
dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands
out, smell strange, savage, look what they’ve done to their own
countries, what will they do to ours?

The insults are easier to swallow than finding your child’s body in
the rubble.

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.

II

I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am
unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the
shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and
the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink
full of blood. The lines, forms, people at the desks, calling cards,
immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into
my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home.
Alhamdulillah, all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely
on fire, a truckload of men who look like my father— pulling out my
teeth and nails. All these men between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie,
his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth.

Home

HOME

Branded