Warsan Shire
Longing · Love
Warsan Shire
A poet approached here through the intimate distances between home, memory and belonging.
Born 1988 · Somali British poet and writer
Their literary world
Warsan Shire writes about displacement, migration, identity, family, and the emotional cost of losing a sense of home. Her poetry gives intimate images to experiences shaped by conflict and collective histories, with particular attention to women, mothers and daughters, and inherited trauma.
In Home, leaving is presented as a matter of survival, not an easy preference. Home can mean place, language, memory, safety, and the people through whom identity is formed. Shire’s poem asks what happens when these sources of belonging become unsafe or impossible to return to.
Featured reading · Flute & Forge reading companion
Home
Read Shire’s poem in full at Poetry International. The companion approaches home as a tender word made difficult by displacement and danger.
Shire’s poem makes displacement impossible to reduce to a choice made lightly. The word ‘home’ carries love and danger at once, and leaving can become a condition of survival. Read the complete poem at Poetry International, allowing its repeated images to build their own argument.
The companion is Flute & Forge writing; the linked page is the published poem.
Read Home at Poetry InternationalA passage
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”Home · from Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011)
A way into the passage
The image challenges easy judgments about migration. It frames departure as a response to danger and asks readers to imagine the pressures that can make leaving necessary.
Essential works
Poem · 2011
Home
A poem about forced migration, displacement, and the search for safety, first published in a collection in 2011.
Poetry collection · 2011
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
A collection exploring womanhood, migration, family, and inherited experience.
Poetry collection · 2022
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
A collection on identity, memory, survival, and the varied lives of women across generations.
A question worth exploring
What does home mean when the place we belong to is no longer safe to return to?
A question to carry with you
Can home live in a person, a language, or a memory?
An editorial introduction by Flute & Forge Studio.