Samiya Bashir’s poem stakes a claim to universal access to joy and freedom. It takes the form of a series of questions, but there are no question marks, and the lack of the formal interrogative turns the poem from a tentative wondering into a series of demands for the way things should be.
Samiya Bashir is an African-American poet born in Somalia and the founder of “Fire & Ink”, an organisation supporting and promoting the work of LGBT writers of African descent.
Several of her poems appear on her website as photo-art pieces. We reproduce “Reckoning Song” here as it appears on her site. For more, see here.
The Ruby Kid