This is my offering to the amazing spoken word poet Warsan Shire. I created this video using licensed stock footage, and I edited together scenes that echo the ache and beauty within For Women Who Are Difficult to Love, a spoken poem by Warsan Shire. Her voice moves like both a prayer and a reckoning, and has healed me in my most vulnerable moments.
The audio comes from her hauntingly intimate album, warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely)—a tender descent through heartbreak, memory, and the hard-won wisdom that lives in the body. This album is a deeply personal collection of spoken word that traverses the raw terrain of abandonment, desire, grief, exile, and self-return. It is not just poetry—it is a memory and a map of survival. I bought a copy years ago and I listen to it often. It brings up different emotions and memories and healing every time.
The album unfolds in seven tracks. Each track carries a stage of loneliness, named courageously:
- the unbearable weight of staying – (the end of the relationship)
A soft collapse into truth—the moment you know love has rotted at the root. - dear moon – (the distraction)
A fleeting light we chase to avoid the dark—how we numb and wander to forget. - how to wear your mother’s lipstick – (the desperation)
Desperate rites of becoming, of seduction, of survival—how girls become women in mirrors not their own. - questions for the woman i was last night – (the honest conversation)
A reckoning with our past selves—the ones we judged, the ones we had to be. - i think i know what we did wrong – (the realization)
The clarity that stings—when the silence between two people becomes louder than the words. - for women who are difficult to love – (the affirmation)
The center of the flame. A salve and a sword for every woman who has been told she is too much. This is a love letter, steeped in truth. - (the prayer)
A moment of breath after the burn. The kind of stillness that knows everything.
If her words speak to something sacred in you, I encourage you to support her by purchasing the full album directly on Bandcamp:
👉 warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely) on Bandcamp
You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.
Warsan Shire
May you find yourself in Warsan’s beautiful work. May you feel witnessed.
