When I went to visit the family of a Syrian refugeed baby I’d been helping organise medical care for, I observed their eyes lighting up as I admitted to them, “انا شاعر” – I’m a poet. It was inappropriate of me not to have a poem to share right then and there, a practical poem for the small room we sat in. So, we bent our heads in silence, sharing the maqlub between us, a giant mound of rice. In the silence I decided I wanted to write rice. How can poems be as useful as grains of rice in crisis?

Language has long been used to destroy, control and denigrate the ways of knowing and being of those subject to colonialism and racism. In this piece, poet and activist lisa luxx traces these colonial roots, as well as the inventive linguistic creolisations of imposed languages that poets have used to resist domestication, “to rewild their grammatology” and “to dream in their own language.”

When a heterosexual person asks, “but how do lesbians have sex?” what they mean is “aren’t women’s bodies lacking a vital organ that’s needed for sex?” The general consensus is that a cis woman’s body is incomplete as a sexual tool, and dick is needed because dick represents sex. When we fork out generous amounts of cash for strap-ons are we setting that message deeper into our bodies? Are we still being fucked by the patriarchy even when there are no men in the room?

Poets risk the safety of their family, their future and any hope that they may ever return ‘home’ when they write, but they still write. The currency of poetry is the ultimate act of revolution. It threatens the government because it galvanizes people into political action. Every poem is loaded with bravery, sincerity and dedication to an uprising. Mazen Maarouf, contemporary Palestinian poet forced into double-exile, says that because there is a big history of poets being hung, kidnapped and tortured, it “means the written poem might be a final word. The poet cannot deny it later”.