Ending FGM, a poem by Warsan Shire

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Warsan Shire, Young Poet Laureate for London, author of 'Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth' (flipped eye, 2011) is a writer, educator and editor based in North West London. As a young woman growing up in London, she found peace and happiness in libraries and with words. Her poetry has garnered her an international reputation, performing poetry in Italy, North America, South America and Kenya as well as the UK. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). In 2013, she won the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize. On National Poetry Day in October 2013 she was awarded with the Young Poet Laureate for London honour by Carol Ann Duffy, national Poet Laureate. See Warsan read the first poem Girls.

Girls

1
Sometimes it's tucked into itself, sewn up like the lips of a prisoner.
After the procedure, the girls learn how to walk again, mermaids with new legs, soft knees buckling under their new stainless, sinless bodies.

2
Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says. If your mother survived it, you can survive it, the father says. Cut, cut, cut.

3
On a reality TV show about beauty, one girl exposes another girls’ secret. They huddle around her asking questions, touching her arm in liberal concern for her pleasure. Can you even feel anything down there? The camera zooms into a Georgia O’Keefe painting in the background.

4
But mother did you even truly survive it? The carving, the cutting, the warm blade against the inner thigh. Scalping. Deforestation. Leveling the ground. Silencing the devils tongue between your legs, maybe you did? I’m asking you sincerely mother, did you truly survive it?
5
Two girls lay in bed beside one another holding mirrors under the mouths of their skirts, comparing wounds.
I am one girl and you are the other.

-Warsan Shire