Vivi is an Iranian-born student at Queensland Academies Creative Industries whose journey to Australia was marked by hope, resilience, and the search for belonging. Her poem Sky Birth is a heartfelt tribute to multiculturalism, celebrating a place where language, heritage, and identity can coexist freely. Through her words, she captures the joy of finding a home where every accent and story is embraced without hesitation.
Sky Birth
by Vivi Darvishi
The rain comes in sharp.
It clicks against the pane like teeth.
A thousand small mouths; grieving.
I wear the sun like a rash.
It peels me.
There is no god in this light
just the hush
of a clean wound.
The language is a trick mirror.
It speaks with my tongue,
but forgets my name.
Every vowel is a hole
I fall through.
I dreamed I lived under a sky
wide as a birthing bed,
stretched blue with veins.
The clouds had wrists.
The clouds bled milk.
I wanted to nurse from them
but woke with a dry mouth.
I do not call this place home.
Its flowers are made of plastic.
They shine, but they do not rot.
They do not speak
my mother’s fever.
I laugh here, yes.
In rooms with walls
white as hospitals.
I press my mouth
to a foreign shoulder
and remember how it felt
to scream in a language
someone answered.
I came with luggage.
With my mother’s hips
folded into zippers.
I came stitched
with films,
wet pillows,
a girlhood held underwater.
We all come this way
passport-eyed,
bleeding from the future.
Some don’t unpack.
Some are tombs
in rented apartments.
There were nights I wanted to leave.
The plane in my throat,
revving.
But I saw her
the girl I was promised.
She sat in the mirror
with a knife and a comb.
She told me:
“Become or burn.”
So I eat the culture raw.
I swallow it whole:
its spices, its gods,
its beautiful ruins.
I let it stitch itself into me.
A second skin.
A fever coat.
Now I write to stay warm.
To stop from splitting.
I write until the words crack
like teeth in sleep.
The notebook falls,
a dead thing,
soft on my face.
Still, I do not cry.
Still, I wait.
Still, I bloom like a bruise
under borrowed sky.