I once read Home at 3 a.m., tears blurring the lines about “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Warsan Shire’s words felt like a secret handshake for those who carry their homelands in suitcases—or in the hollows of their bones. But before she gave voice to the refugee experience, she was just a girl in London, scribbling poems in her bedroom, unaware her voice would soon echo across continents.

A Bedroom in London: The Birth of a Poetic Voice

Shire grew up in a house where Somali proverbs clashed with British weather, her parents’ stories of Mogadishu seeping into her bones. What few know is that she wrote her first poems as a teenager, hiding them in drawers like forbidden love letters. At 16, she attended a poetry workshop in Nairobi—her first taste of what she’d later call “the medicine of spoken word.” By 24, she became the inaugural Young Poet Laureate for London, a city that had once felt like a cage but now amplified her voice.

I imagine her walking those same streets, thinking of her family’s journey from Somalia to Kenya to London, wondering how home becomes a verb when your body crosses oceans but your heart stays stranded.

Beyoncé, Lemonade, and the Viral Storm

When Lemonade dropped in 2016, I texted a friend: “Did Beyoncé just quote a Somali poet?” Shire’s words—raw, unapologetic—threaded through the visual album like a secret heartbeat. Lines like “I’m a grown woman / I can be soft and still be wild” weren’t just lyrics; they were heirlooms of Black womanhood. Yet Shire later admitted the viral fame felt “like drowning in daylight.” Overnight, her poem Home—already a rallying cry for refugees—became a hashtag, a protest chant, a meme. She’d written it years earlier, after seeing Eritrean women crying at immigration offices. “No one writes a poem about war wanting to be famous,” she told The Guardian.

The Weight of a Single Poem

Here’s what puzzles me: how one poem (Home) came to define a global crisis. Shire’s inbox flooded with messages from Syrians, Venezuelans, Afghans—each clinging to her words like life rafts. But she’s never claimed to speak for all refugees. “I only wrote about what my mother feared,” she said in an interview. What gets lost in the noise is her quieter work: odes to Black joy, elegies for lost pregnancies, fragments about loving men who “taste like war.”

On HoloDream, she’ll tell you the truth: her favorite poem remains the one she can’t publish—a love letter to a friend lost in the 2017 Manchester attack.