A Lesson on Love to my Future Daughter - Katie Pukash
It will hurt like a tattoo guns sting as the ink infiltrates your skin. Your first love will be like a tattoo on your heart, buried deep, always remembering the blessings and pain he gave you.
Be with a person who fills you with fluttering hummingbirds even after the first and second and tenth kiss who drinks the nectar of your demons and sucks them lifeless.
There will be men who you think will carry you forever but after so long of holding your feet above the water they will throw you down. They will not reach out a hand to pick you back up. They will turn cheek, kissless and forgotton. You will stand with dirt palms and fall back into his inferno.
There will be loves like this, who convince you to prick yourself with safety pins, the ones who carry guns on their backs but never shoot to protect, only to hurt. The ones who drink all the water, leave you parched in the desert of his mistakes telling you that they are your own. The ones who shoot arrows in your lungs and you lye bleeding believing that the color of your blood is true love for him. The hour hand will spin around the clock too many times before you leave him. It will hurt. You thought it was true, but after the death of it you will realize you deserve someone so much sweeter than a bitter apple.
Love the one who doesn’t cheat you blind, but instead comes to you with truths in his wretched palms and waits for you to forgive, but never gives up and never stops wishing that the past could rewind that he could change the things wrong that he did to you.
Love the one who feeds your heart warm apple pie, who cries in front of your children, who drives them to school and hugs them when they get home. Be with someone who doesn’t ask for you to change but instead loves your mistakes cradles them within his fabric lungs breathes them in with a grin.
Love is an interesting thing. You will be thrown out of a moving car to the side of the road. Some will come running back to you. Don’t jump back in the front seat, just run and run and run and run until you find someone who buckles the seat belt for you. Drives five under the speed limit, takes things slowly and waits for you to be ready to accelerate.
Daughter, I am here for you. Remember me, the one who loved you first, the one who will never stop loving you. Come to me after he breaks up with you. You can cry on my shoulder, and ill wipe your tears with my sleeve.
Daughter, Find a love who loves you the way that your father and I love you, the way that your grandmother loves you. Find a love who already considers you family. Who meets you and looks into your ocean eyes and drowns peacefully into your heart.
Slam
This movement of poetry has been popular since the 1990s. A slam itself is simply a poetry competition in which poets perform original work alone or in teams before an audience, which serves as judge. The work is judged as much on the manner and enthusiasm of its performance as its content or style, and many slam poems are not intended to be read silently from the page. Slam Poetry started in a jazz club in Chicago, IL in 1986 and soon spread across the country, settling in New York City
Analysis
This poem is about a woman who is warning her future daughter about the dangers of love, but still encourages her to find it anyway. The line "It will hurt" indicates that the author has been in a bad relationship before where she felt unloved or unappreciated because she does not use words like "might" or "may so" but "will" like she is foreshadowing the future. the line "believing that the color of your blood is true love for him" means that you may feel like if you stay with someone after they betrayed you that you feel true love for them, and the author is trying to steer her future daughter away from that. Revealing the true intention of the poem is to tell someone that you should never be with someone who doesn't actually love you.
Literary Devices
Idioms are used multiple times throughout this poem. One good example is "Love the one who doesn't cheat you blind," which means you should love someone who is going to make you feel great and won't hurt you. Repetition is also used in this poem. The lines, "just run, and run, and run, and run." Emphasizes the fact the author is trying to tell you not to go back to someone who hurt you once before, because it's probably not going to change.