This week's poem comes from our upcoming 2020 poet Afshan D'souza-Lodhi who's debut re:desire will be released 25th June. 

Poem text:

Are we?

we are the generation of women

who's fathers were around but

who's mothers ran houses raised children fed armies cleaned up your messes and your messes and your messes and never seemed to get into any messes herself.

we are the generation that holds

each other in silence, across

the internet and in every single cliche

we are talked about but never allowed to live in.

we are the generation of radical

honesty, the kind that doesn't let a friend

leave the house with their skirt tucked

into their knickers, but the kind

that lies with kindness and discretion.

we are the resistance, the ones

that grew up on twitter

and protested regimes across borders.

we use memes to politicise and get quoted

by acamedics theorising about our lives

we are the ones that build houses

using youtube, we fix lamps and boilers and that leak underneath the tap.

we google and facebook and ask

the neighbourhood group

if anyone has a spare pot of paint to

do up the garden and on-up the annoying neighbour.

we are the children

of those that inherited books as gifts.

we pride ourselves in packed

bookcases of books we've never read.

we use our time wisely, to write poetry, to

sing loudly in the kitchen while making the buns

our mothers used to bake for us kids

we buy flour and eggs and forget to buy

yeast but facetime with home will save us and the buns.

we are-

and we will be-

its just a matter of how.

---

https://twitter.com/afshandl

http://burningeye.co.uk