Rupi Kaur's "Milk and Honey"

Rupi Kaur—A woman with the love of poetry, art, and creating work that moves everyone who reads it. Since the young age of five years old, she found her passion for drawing and creating works of art. Her young start led her to where she is today—a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Milk and Honey is her most famous piece of work as it is filled with beautiful, raw, and moving poems. Milk and Honey is split into four parts. The hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing. Each of these sections containing real, non-filtered pieces of poetry that quickly shook every one who has read it.

the hurting:

This section is deep and made me thing about a lot of things when I was reading it. It focuses on the struggles of femininity, family issues, and being used. This part as well as all the others is focused more for a female audience as it deals with issues and pain the female community faces in today’s society. The first poem in this part references the books title.

This poem sets the tone of the entire book as it can be relatable to the audience. This poem doesn’t go deep into the topic of hurt as much as some of the others do. In this section especially, Rupi does not sugar coat anything. Her unfiltered words have opened many eyes because she covers personal issues such as rape and abuse as well as not feeling like you are enough or self-doubt.

the loving:

Love has been said to be one of the most intense feelings possible for humans to feel. Rupi touches on many aspects of love—relationships, family, love towards others, and self-love. She writes about the loving side of relationships and the sexual side of them as well, making it very unfiltered and real. A lot of poems in this section relate back to self-love and how we MUST love ourselves first in order to let ourselves love others. Even when others may not love us, we can always step in and fill the voids that they cause to be missing in our lives. Rupi reminds us of that.

the breaking:

Breaking is what comes after the hurt. We all break because we were hurt in some way. This section really focuses on people leaving and being missed. When any kind of relationship ends, we can feel broken and alone. A short, simple poem in this that sums up breaking as a whole is,

people go

but how

they left

always stays

Being left whether it be in a relationship or friendship, always hurts us. It stays with us until we decide it is time to let go and heal. I think this poem can relate to most people because in some point in our lives we will grow apart from some one who means a lot to us, and that can be the worst kind of breaking.

the healing:

We must break in order to heal. Healing is the last phase of getting better when life goes wrong. Rupi again focuses this section on self-love. She lets us know that it is okay to respect our bodies, mind, and soul, even when the people around us do not. My favorite poem in this section says,

if you were born with

the weakness to fall

you were born with

the strength to rise

We often forget that we do have strength to rise above and heal from the most bitter times. This poem reminds us how being strong is a natural thing that we can all do if we have faith in ourselves. Loving yourself and the world around you can make a difference, we must always remember that.

Rupi’s work touches on four common themes of life, mostly focused on women. The hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing. I have gone through all of these, WE have gone through all of these. At some point we will go through the most bitter times in life, but this book reminds us that, “there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.” Even when we go through the hurting; the breaking, we can turn it into something extraordinary. We can grow from it. Because from hurt and falling apart comes growth and self-love and most importantly, falling back together.