Warsan Shire (born 1988) is a Somali-British writer and poet. She was the first Young Poet Laureate for London and gained international recognition for her poetry in Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade . Her work primarily explores themes of home, displacement, immigration, and the female body. Her collection Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth is considered a seminal work in contemporary poetry.
Her body was a map of places she had never been but somehow remembered. There was a blue shadow beneath her ribs—a permanent indigo stain that felt like a thumbprint left by a god who had gripped her too hard. She called it the "blue war." It was the ache of her mother’s unspilled tears and the silence of her grandmother’s secrets, all distilled into a single, aching hue. her blue body warsan shire pdf
The blue spreads.