Tea With Our Grandmothers by Warsan Shire
Tea With Our Grandmothers by Warsan Shire

Tea With Our Grandmothers

Warsan Shire * Track #20 On Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth

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Tea With Our Grandmothers by Warsan Shire

Performed by
Warsan Shire
About

This poem celebrates the poet’s grandmothers in a distinctive and unique style. The poet uses different languages relating to her mixed race origins — Arabic, Somali and Welsh — to indicate the grandmother she is referring to. Through the use of distinctive imagery — grinding cardamom, skin like “ta...

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Tea With Our Grandmothers Annotated

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

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