And you are here living despite it all- Rupi Kaur poetry
Today on the blog we will be featuring Rupi Kaur’s poetry- Rupi Kaur is an Indian-born Canadian poet, writer, illustrator artist, and spoken performer. She immigrated to Canada as a child and has since settled in Toronto. She is a #1 new york best-selling author and illustrator of two outstanding poetry collections ( Milk And Honey & The Sun And Her Flowers).
Rupi Kaur’s book Milk and Honey, her debut collection is centered around love, loss, trauma, abuse, healing, and femininity. It is split into four chapters the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing.
While The Sun And Her Flowers is a collection of poetry about grief, self-abandonment, honoring one’s root, love and empowering oneself. It is split into five chapters wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming.
And through her collections, her poetry has gained popular attention leaving an arch on the literary sphere.
Rupi Kaur poetry brought about a shift in the literary world, from her performance, her illustrations to her creative employment of simple words in addressing compound issues in the society like Rape, Depression, Self Love, Feminism, immigration, Love, etc.
Her journey emerged from sharing short pieces on Instagram and the warmness of her content encouraged her to publish her first poetry collection Milk and Honey which brought about the Insta poetry sensation and a large positive scale of influence on the lives of her readers.
There have been several claims on Rupi Kaur poetry evaluating the authenticity of poetry acclaiming her piece to simple lines alone and no atom of literature.
The simplicity of Rupi Kaur poetry has been questioned: is she overrated? Or the simplistic lines are worth the exhilaration? Personally, poetry to me is a medium of escape, an easel to paint out distress, a canvas of truth that involves the manipulation of words, employing simplicity or complexity.
People often claim that literature and poetry are accustomed to complexity but the core reason of the artistic expression is to communicate and share some lines, so whether the artistic expression is complex or simple the artistic domination cannot be overlooked.
Rupi Kaur’s success crowned her an instant media and literary darling, her books (Milk And Honey And The Sun And Her Flowers) changing and influencing lives around the world selling over 2.5 million copies.
Rupi Kaur’s poetry has ushered in serenity soothing and calming broken hearts, her books have served as a therapeutic instrument to get over depression and gain greater heights with self-love. Rupi Kaur’s poetry has been a beaming light in the literary world and I will be sharing a handful of motivating, inspiring poems from Rupi Kaur books.
Milk And Honey Book
Milk and honey quotes (Rupi Kaur Poetry)
1. Like the rainbow after the rain, joy will reveal itself. ~Rupi Kaur
2. When snow falls I long grass, when grass grows I walk all over it, when leaves change color I beg for flowers, when flowers bloom I pick them- unappreciative. ~Rupi Kaur
3. We have been dying since we got here and forget to enjoy the view -live fully. ~Rupi Kaur
4. You don’t just wake up and become the butterfly -growth is a process. ~Rupi Kaur
5. When the world comes crashing at your feet, it’s okay to let others help pick up the pieces. If we’re present to take part in your happiness when your circumstances are great we are more than capable of sharing your pain -community. ~Rupi Kaur
6. Let it go, let it leave, let it happen, nothing in this world was promised or belonged to you anyway -all you own is yourself. ~Rupi Kaur
7. Wish pure love and soft peace upon the ones who’ve been unkind to you and keep moving forward -this will free you both. ~Rupi Kaur
8. I have survived far too much to go quietly; let a meteor take me, call the thunder for backup, my death will be grand. The land will crack, the sun will eat itself. ~Rupi Kaur
9. If I am the longest relationship of my life, isn’t it time to nurture intimacy and love with the person I lie in bed with each night -acceptance. ~Rupi Kaur
10. What is stronger than the human heart which shatters over and still lives. ~Rupi Kaur
11. I woke up thinking the work was done I would not have to practice today, how naïve to think healing was that easy when there is no endpoint, no finish line to cross, healing is everyday work. ~ Rupi Kaur
12. You have so much but are always hungry for more, stop looking up at everything you don’t have and look around at everything you do -where the satisfaction lives. ~Rupi Kaur
13. You can imitate a light like mine but you cannot become it. ~Rupi Kaur
14. And here you are living despite it all. ~Rupi Kaur
15. This is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as I wept, think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt, fall, root, rise in order to bloom. ~Rupi Kaur
16. Borders are man-made they only divide us physically, don’t let them make us turn on each other -we are not enemies. ~Rupi Kaur
17. Perhaps we are all immigrants trading one home for another, first, we leave the womb for air then the suburbs for the filthy city in search for a better life, some of us just happen to leave entire countries. ~Rupi Kaur
18. My god is not waiting inside a church or sitting above the temple’s step, my god is the refugee’s breath as she’s running, is living in the starving child’s belly, is the heartbeat of the protest. My god does rest between pages written by holy men, my god lives between the sweaty thighs of women’s bodies sold for money, was seen washing the homeless man’s feet, my god is not as unreachable as they’d like you to think my god is beating inside us infinitely. ~Rupi Kaur
19. Advice I would’ve given my mother on her wedding day:
- You are allowed to say NO.
- Years ago, his father beat the language of love out of your husband’s back he will never know how to say it but his actions prove he loves you.
- Go with him when he enters your body and goes to that place, sex is not dirty.
- No matter how many times his family brings it up, do not have the abortion just because I’m a girl; lock the relatives out and swallow the key he will not hate you.
- Take your journal and paintings across the ocean when you leave, these will remind you who you are when you get lost amid new cities, they will also remind your children you had an entire life before then.
- When your husbands are off working at the factories, make friends with each other lonely women in the apartment complex. This loneliness will cut a person in half, you will need each other to stay alive.
- Your husband and children will take your plate, we will emotionally and mentally starve you. All of it is wrong, don’t let us convince you that sacrificing yourself is how you must show love.
- When your mother dies, fly back for the funeral; money comes and goes a mother is once in a lifetime.
- You are allowed to spend a couple of dollars on coffee I knew there was a time when we could not afford it but we are okay now. Breathe.
- You can’t speak English fluently or operate a computer or cell phone, we did that to you. It is not your fault, you are not any less than the other mothers with their flashy phones and designer clothing, we confined you to the four walls of this home and worked you to the bone; you have not been your own property for decades.
- There was no rule book for how to be the first woman in your lineage to raise a family on a strange land by yourself.
- You are the person I look up to most.
- When I am about to shatter I think of your strength and harden.
- I think you are a magician.
- I want to fill the rest of your life with ease.
- You are the hero of heroes, the god of gods.
20. Remember the body of your community, breathe in the people who sewed you whole. It is you who became yourself but those before you are a part of your fabric -know the roots. ~Rupi Kaur
21. My mother sacrificed her dreams so I could dream. ~Rupi Kaur
22. I struggle so deeply to understand how someone can pour their entire soul, blood and energy into someone without wanting anything in return -I will have to wait till I’m a mother. ~Rupi Kaur
23. When my daughter is living in my belly I will speak to her like she’s already changed the world, she will walk out of me on a red carpet fully equipped with the knowledge that she’s capable of anything she sets her mind to. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
Rupi Kaur Love Poems
24. I will welcome a partner who is my equal. ~Rupi Kaur
25. When you are full I am full, we are two suns. ~Rupi Kaur
26. You move my hand between my legs and whisper make them pretty little fingers dance for me. ~Rupi Kaur
27. When death takes my hand, I will hold you with the other and promise to find you in every lifetime. ~Rupi Kaur
28. Every revolution starts and ends with his lips ~Rupi Kaur
29. There is a difference between someone telling you they love you and them actually loving you. ~Rupi Kaur
30. Sometimes the apology never comes when it is wanted and when it comes it is neither wanted nor needed -you are too late. ~Rupi Kaur
31. What am I to you he asks, I put my hands in his lap and whisper you are every hope I’ve ever had in human form. ~Rupi Kaur
32. My favorite thing about you is your smell; you smell like earth herbs garden, a little more human than the rest of us. ~Rupi Kaur
33. Nothing is safer than the sound of you reading out loud to me. ~Rupi Kaur
34. Tell them I was the warmest place you knew and you turned me cold. ~Rupi Kaur
35. It was as though someone had slid ice cubes down the back of my shirt -orgasm. ~Rupi Kaur
36. You have been inside me before -another lifetime. ~Rupi Kaur
37. He placed his hands on my mind before reaching for my waist, my hips or my lips. He didn’t call me beautiful first he called me exquisite -how he touches me. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
38. I am learning how to love him by loving myself. ~Rupi Kaur
39. The very thought of you has my legs spread apart like an easel with a canvas begging for art. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
40. I am ready for you I have always been ready for you. ~Rupi Kaur
41. I do not want to have you fill the empty parts of me, I want to be full on my own, I want to be so complete I could light a whole city and then I want to have you cause the two of us combined could set it on fire. ~Rupi Kaur
42. Love will come and when love comes love will hold you and you will melt. Sometimes though love will hurt you, but love will never mean to, love will play no games cause love knows life has been hard enough already. ~Rupi Kaur
43. I’d be lying if I said you make me speechless, the truth is you make my tongue so weak it forgets what language to speak in. ~Milk and Honey Book
44. You might not have been my first love, but you were the love that made all the other loves irrelevant. ~Milk and Honey Book
45. You’ve touched me without even touching me. ~Milk and Honey Book
46. Your name is the strongest positive and negative connotation in any language it either lights me up or leaves me aching for days. ~Milk and Honey Book
47. You talk too much he whispers into my ear, I can think of better ways to use that mouth. ~Milk and Honey Book
48. It’s your voice that undresses me. ~Milk and Honey Book
49. Most importantly love like it’s the only thing you know how, at the end of the day all this means nothing. This page where you’re sitting, your degree, your job, the money nothing even matters except love and human connection, who loved and how deeply you loved them, how you touched the people around you and how much you gave them. ~Milk and Honey Book
50. You wrap your fingers around my hair and pull this is how you make music out of me. ~Milk and Honey Book
51. On days like this, I need you to run your fingers through my hair and speak softly. ~Milk and Honey Book
52. I want your hands to hold not my hands, your lips to kiss not my lips and other places. ~Milk and Honey Book
53. I need someone who knows struggle as well as I do, someone willing to hold my feet in their lap on days it is too difficult to stand, the type of person who gives exactly what I need before I even know I need it, the type of lover who hears me even when I do not speak is the type of understanding I demand -Type of lover I need. ~Milk and Honey Book
54. God must have kneaded you and I from the same dough, rolled us out as one, on the baking sheet must have suddenly realized how unfair it was to put that much magic in one person and sadly split that dough in two; how else is it that when I look in the mirror I am looking at you, when you breathe my own lungs fill with air, that we just meet but we have known each other our whole lives, if we were not made as one to begin with -our souls are mirrors. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
55. To be two legs on one body -relationship. ~Rupi Kaur
56. If you got any more beautiful the sun would leave its place and come for you. ~Rupi Kaur
57. To-do list (after the breakup)
- Take refuge in your bed.
- Cry till the tears stop (this will take a few days).
- Don’t listen to slow songs.
- Delete their number from your phone and even though it is memorized on your fingertips.
- Don’t look at old photos.
- Find the closest ice cream shop and treat yourself to two scoops of mint chocolate chip, the mint will calm your heart. You deserve the chocolate.
- Buy new sheets.
- Collect all the gifts, t-shirts, and everything with their smell on it and drop it off at a donation center.
- Plan a trip.
- Perfect the art of smiling and nodding when someone brings their name up in their conversation.
- Start a new project.
- Whatever you do, do not call.
- Do not beg for what does not want to stay.
- Stop crying at some point.
- Allow yourself to feel foolish for believing you could’ve built the rest of your life in someone’s else stomach.
- Breathe.
Rupi Kaur Self-Love Poems
58. The universe took its time on you, crafted you to offer the world something different from everyone else, when you doubt how you were created you doubt an energy greater than us both -irreplaceable. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
59. Our backs tell stories no book have the spine to carry –woman of color. ~Milk and Honey Book
60. Accept yourself as you were designed. ~Milk and Honey Book
61. Your body is a museum of natural disasters, can you grasp how stunning that is. ~Milk and Honey Book
62. Others women’s bodies are not our battlegrounds.
63. Removing all the hair off your body is okay if that’s what you want to do. ~Milk and Honey Book
64. You were a dragon long before he came around and said you could fly, you will remain a dragon long after he’s left. ~Milk and Honey Book
65. How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you. ~Milk and Honey Book
66. You are your own soul mate. ~Milk and Honey Book
67. Some people are so bitter to them you must be kindest. ~Milk and Honey Book
68. You must enter a relationship with yourself before anyone else. ~Milk and Honey Book
69. Accept that you deserve more than painful love, life is moving the healthiest thing for your heart is to move with it. ~Milk and Honey Book
70. It is a part of the human experience to feel pain, do not be afraid, open yourself to it. ~Milk and Honey Book
71. If you are not enough for yourself you will never be enough for someone else. ~Milk and Honey Book
72. You must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself first. ~Milk and Honey Book
73. We all move forward when we recognize how resilient and striking the women around us are. ~Milk and Honey Book
74. For you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beauty rooted so deep within you, you can’t help but see it everywhere. ~Milk and Honey Book
75. Hair- if it was not supposed to be there would not be growing on our bodies in the first place -we are at war with what comes naturally to us. ~Milk and Honey Book
76. Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself. ~Milk and Honey Book
77. You are in the habit of co-depending on people to make up for what you think you lack. Who tricked you into believing another person was meant to complete you when the most they can do is complement. ~Milk and Honey Book
78. Do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you. ~Milk and Honey Book
79. If you were born with the weakness to fall, you were born with the strength to rise. ~Milk and Honey Book
80. Perhaps the saddest of all are those who live waiting for someone they’re not sure exists -7 billion people. ~Milk and Honey Book
81. The next time he points out the hair on your leg is growing back, remind that boy your body is not his home, he is a guest warn him to never outstep his welcome again. ~Milk and honey
82. To be soft is to be powerful. ~Milk and Honey Book
83. I have what I have and I am happy I’ve lost what I’ve lost and I am still happy -outlook. ~Milk and Honey Book
84. We are all born so beautiful, the greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not. ~Milk and Honey Book
85. You deserve to be completely found in your surroundings not lost within them. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
86. I like the way the stretch marks on my thighs look human and that we’re so soft yet rough and jungle wild when we need to be, I love that about us. How capable we are of feeling, how unafraid we are of breaking and tend to our wounds with grace just being a woman calling myself a woman makes me utterly whole and complete. ~Milk and Honey Book
87. My issue with what they consider beautiful is their concept of beauty centers around excluding people I find hair beautiful, when a woman wears it like a garden on her skin that is the definition of beauty, big hooked noses pointing upward to the sky lie they’re rising to the occasion skin the color of earth. ~Milk and Honey Book
88. I thank the universe for taking everything it has taken and giving to me everything it is giving -balance. ~Milk and Honey Book
89. It takes grace to remain kind in cruel situations. ~Milk and Honey Book
90. I reduced my body to aesthetics, forgot the work it did to keep me alive with every beat and breath, declared it a grand failure for not looking like theirs, searched everywhere for a miracle foolish enough to not realize I was already living in one. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
91. I will no longer compare my path to others, I refuse to do a disservice to my life. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
92. I am the product of all the ancestors getting together and deciding these stories need to be told. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
93. Many tried but failed to catch me, I am the ghost of ghosts everywhere and nowhere. I am magic tricks within magic none have figured out I am a world wrapped in worlds folded in suns and moons you can try but you won’t get those hands on me. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
94. There are far too many mouths here but not enough of them are worth what you’re offering, give yourself a few and to those few give heavily -invest in the right people. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
95. Beautiful brown girl, your thick hair is a mint coat not all can afford. Beautiful brown girl you hate the hyperpigmentation but your skin can’t help carrying as much sun as possible you are a magnet for the light unibrow- the bridging of two words, vagina-so much darker than the rest of you cause it is trying to hide a gold mine you will have dark circles too early-appreciate the halos beautiful brown girl you pull god out of their bellies. ~The Sun And Her Flowers (Rupi KaurPoetry)
96. Look down at your body whisper there is no home like you -thank you. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
97. Learning to not envy someone’s else blessings is what grace looks like. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
98. Trust your body it reacts to right and wrong better than your mind does. It is speaking to you. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
99. I stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me thinking what can I do to make this mountain taller so the women after me can see farther -legacy. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
100. It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
101. I made change after change on the road to perfection but when I finally felt beautiful enough their definition of beauty suddenly changed. What if there is no finish line and in an attempt to keep up I lose the gifts I was born with for a beauty so insecure it can’t commit to itself -the lies they sell. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
102. It is a trillion-dollar industry that would collapse if we believed we were beautiful enough already. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
103. I notice everything I do not have and decide it is beautiful. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
104. Or you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beauty rooted so deep within you you can’t help but see it everywhere. ~Milk and Honey Book
105. Their concept of beauty is manufactured I am not. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
106. It is a blessing to be the color of earth, do you know how often flowers confuse me for home. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
107. You are a mirror, if you continue to starve yourself of love, you’ll only meet people who’ll starve you too. If you soak yourself in love, the universe will hand you those who’ll love you too -a simple math. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
108. There are mountains growing beneath our feet that cannot be contained all we’ve endured has prepared us for this, bring your hammers and fists we have a glass ceiling to shatter -let’s leave this place roofless. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
109. What is the greatest lesson a woman should learn that since day one she’s already had everything she needs within herself it’s the world that convinced her she did not. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
110. They convinced me I only had a few good years left before I was replaced by a girl younger than me as though men yield power with age but women grew into irrelevance. They can keep their lies for I have just gotten started I feel as though I just left the womb my twenties are a warm-up for what I’m really about to do wait till you see me in my thirties now that will be a proper introduction to the nasty, wild, woman in me. How can I leave before the party’s started rehearsals begin at forty I ripen with age I do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show -timeless. ~The Sun And Her Flowers (Rupi Kaur Poetry)
111. Many try but cannot tell the difference between a marigold and my sin both of them are an orange sun blinding the ones who have not learned to love the light. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
Rupi Kaur Inspiring Poems
112. The day you have everything I hope you remember when you had nothing. ~Rupi Kaur
113. Now is not the time to be quiet or make room for you when you have no room at all, now is our time to be mouthy get as loud as we need to be heard. ~Rupi Kaur
114. Our Work should equip the next generation of women to outdo us in every field this the legacy we’ll leave behind -progress. ~Rupi Kaur
115. I hear a thousand kind words about me and it makes no difference yet I hear one insult and all confidence shatters -focusing on the negative. ~Rupi Kaur Poetry
116. They leave and act like it never happened they come back and act like they never left. ~Milk and Honey Book
117. I want to apologize to all the women I have called beautiful before I’ve called them intelligent or brave I am sorry I made it sound as though something as simple as what you’re born with is all you have to be proud of when you have broken mountains with you wit form now on I will say things like you are resilient, or you are extraordinary not because I don’t think you’re beautiful but because I need you to know you are more than that”
~Rupi Kaur Poetry
118. Stay strong through your pain, grow flowers from it you have helped me grow flowers out of mine so bloom beautifully dangerously loudly bloom softly however you need just bloom. ~Milk and Honey Book
119. I don’t know what living a balanced life feels like when I am sad I don’t cry I pour, when I am happy I don’t smile I glow, when I am angry I don’t yell I burn. The good thing about feeling in extremes is when I love I give them wings but perhaps that isn’t such a good thing cause they always tend to leave and you should see me when my heart is broken, I don’t grieve. ~Milk and Honey Book
120. Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong we think it’s something to search for out there, something meant to crash into us on our way out of an elevator or slip into our chair at a cafe somewhere, appear at the end of an aisle at the bookstore looking the right amount of sexy and intellectual but I think love starts here everything else is just desire and projection of all our wants needs and fantasies. ~The Sun And Her Flowers
121. I will tell you about selfish people even when they know they will hurt you they walk into your life to taste you because you are the type of being they don’t want to miss out on.
You are too much shine to not be felt so when they have gotten a good look at everything you have to offer, when they have taken your skin, your hair, your secrets with them when they realize how real this is how much of a storm you are and it hits them.
That is when the cowardice sets in, that is when the person you thought they were is replaced with the sad reality of what they are. That is when they lose every fighting bone in their body and leave after saying you will find better than me.
You will stand there naked with half of them still hidden somewhere inside you and sob, asking them why they did it. Why they forced you to love them when they had no intention of loving you back and they’ll say something along the lines of I just had to try, I had to give it a chance, it was you after all.
But that isn’t romantic, it isn’t sweet. The idea that they were so engulfed by your existence that had to risk breaking it for the sake of knowing they weren’t the one missing out your existence meant that little next to their curiosity of you.
That is the thing about selfish people, they gamble entire beings, entire souls to please their own. One second they are holding you like the world in their lap and the next they have belittled you to a mere picture, a moment, something of the past. One second they swallow you up and whisper they want to spend the rest of their life with you but the moment they sense fear, they are already halfway the door without having the nerve to let you go with grace as if the human heart means that little to them.
122. If he can’t help but degrade other women when they’re not looking, if toxicity is central to his language he could hold you in his lap and be soft honey that man could feed you sugar and douse you in rose water but that still could not make him sweet -If you want to know the type of man he is. ~Milk and Honey Book. (Rupi Kaur Poetry)
123. The world gives you so much pain and here you are making gold out of it -There is nothing purer than that. ~Milk and Honey Book
124. Of course, I want to be successful but I don’t carve success for me I need to be successful to gain enough milk and honey to help those around me succeed. ~Milk and Honey Book
125. What terrifies me most is how we foam at the mouth with envy when others succeed but sigh in relief when they are falling, our struggle to celebrate each other is what’s proven most difficult in being human. ~Milk and Honey Book
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