The book on the nightstand: Milk and honey

If this is the book that every woman should keep on the nightstand – I quoted the Huffington Post – I say that Rupi Kaur‘s book should never leave it:

welcome milk and honey, welcome poetry!

Anyone who reads this collection of texts will find a cuddle, a slap, a breath of oxygen, a deep breath. The author is Rupi Kaur and this is her first book, self-published in 2014.

This very young “poetess of the web” use poetry to bare without fear of spit, insults, salt on the wounds and of her courage she must be proud. Trust me, after reading her emotions in poetry, you thank her for giving voice to yours.

When it comes to poetry, you think of something intimate and intimate is in fact the atmosphere that surrounds you while you’re reading the words of Rupi, but Rupi is honest.

To talk about her life she cannot escape to the pain of the wounds:

if I knewn
what safety looked like
I would have spent
less time falling into
arms that were not

Suffering doesn’t prevent her from feeling love:

you might not have been my first love
but you
all other loves
irrelevant

Rupi is a woman who lives in the real world and just as it happens in reality she knows that where there is joy, there is also pain.

The author gives us a gift of her poetry, a balm for anyone who feels broken:

people go

but how

they left

always stays

This collection, divided into four chapters, tells in verse four moments that cyclically alternate in anyone’s life: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing.

The last of these is the one I prefer because when we feel the strong sense of loss on our skin, the abominable pain that only love makes you feel, we forget that we can heal, we don’t remember that healing comes also to us:

you were a dragon long before
he came around and said
you could fly

you will remain a dragon
long after he’s left

Short, timid and personal is the poetry of Rupi Kaur. No capital letters, no punctuation outside the full stop: so she celebrates her mother tongue, Punjabi. I wish her poetry to anyone who doesn’t lack the courage to hurt, love, break and heal.

Reading time
four evenings of poetry