OTHER WRITING

Spelling Malala

 

A girl of fourteen fires unseen bullets from her mouth

each time she opens it; at fifteen, they flare from her

fingers as she forms letters, with a stick in the dirt,

with a pencil, taking aim over a keyboard,

striking terror with each key.

 

I. W.A.N.T. T.O. L.E.A.R.N.

 

What Devil, what God, puts brains in a girl?

Minute, yet toxic, like radioactive particles,

a crack team’s challenge inside a growing frame,

to be isolated, eradicated, before a woman’s shape

makes them impossible to locate inside

all that emerging flesh.

 

Oh, it is vital work, viral, one bullet in the right

soft tissue blasts shut a thousand mouths,

myriad minds. One girl, one gun, one message.

 

I. W.A.N.T. T.O. L.I.V.E. Never mind

how you spell it. You won’t learn to write it.

Bite down on your bullets. Slam shut the door

to the mind you might want opened

instead of blown apart.

 

Saved on my Desktop is the first piece I read in 2012 regarding the shooting of Malala Yousafzai (Taliban Shoots Pakistani Schoolgirl In Head is the unforgettable Document title). Malala herself was of course first cab off the rank in this week’s “New Suffragettes” series in the Independent, and in the months since the unspeakable headline whumped the world in the gut, she has become more of an emblem than any child might be expected to manage.

I wrote this poem in the weeks after the event. It was the winning entry in Index on Censorship’s 40th Anniversary Poetry Competition, was published in the journal, and read out by Jonathan Dimbleby – with an appropriate level of righteous fire – at a gala event in Kings Place, London, late last year.