Poetry Space Analysis #1: What Love Looks Like...?

When being asked the question “what does love look like”, you can get a variety of responses. Some may be like Rupi Kaur and their first instinct would be to delineate every physical and non-tangible characteristic of their significant other, or some may say that they do not believe true love exists. I have always found this question to be quite interesting and goes deeper than people perceive it to. The poem, written by the talented Kaur, features her attempting to figure out how one would be able to pinpoint love in a very large crowd. She writes that,

“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

but those externalities could never work out

if we didn't turn inward and learn

how to love ourselves in order to love other people”

in these lines alone she debunks the idea that love is a person other than yourself. Kaur enunciates on the idea that it is implausible to be able to express love for others without expressing love for yourself. This is a concept I so strongly stand by. How can you expect people to take your so called genuine love, when it is ever so obvious you neglect your own self? It doesn’t show any signs of love. You aren’t able to give what you don’t have, it just doesn’t make any sense. In order to find out what love is or looks like, start within yourself. thats where your love lies. that is what love looks like, not anything else, just you.

whilst the notion of self-love may be creasing to most, it really is the best type of love- comfort within yourself. hope this opened your eyes <4

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“that's when it hit me

and i realized how naive i had been

to place an idea so beautiful on the image of a person

as if anybody on this entire earth

could encompass all love represented

as if this emotion seven billion people tremble for

would look like a five foot eleven

medium-sized brown-skinned guy

who likes eating frozen pizza for breakfast” - Rupi Kaur