This is our guide to eleven Rupi Kaur poems about womanhood: the women who came before us, the women beside us, and the women who'll come after. Each one links to the post where Kaur shared it herself, and under each link we've written what the poem is doing, how it's built, and why it might stay with you.
We started this collection for Women's History Month, and we keep coming back to it. Some days the world tells women they're too much and not enough in the same breath. These poems push back, gently and sometimes not so gently. If you've ever needed a reminder that you come from somewhere and you're going somewhere, you're in the right place.
Who Rupi Kaur is
Rupi Kaur is a poet, illustrator and performer, born in Punjab, India, in 1992 and raised in Brampton, Ontario, after her family moved to Canada when she was a small child. She wrote, illustrated and self-published her first collection, milk and honey, in November 2014 while still at university. Andrews McMeel republished it in 2015, and it became one of the best-selling poetry books of the century.
She's often called the face of Instapoetry, the short, shareable verse that found its first readers on Instagram rather than in literary journals. Readers credit her with bringing poetry to millions who'd never bought a poetry book.
Critics, most famously the poet Rebecca Watts, have called this kind of work artless. We think you can keep both thoughts in mind at once, and the best way to decide is to read her slowly.
How to read a Rupi Kaur poem
Notice the lowercase and the lone period first. Kaur has explained that Gurmukhi, the script she grew up reading Punjabi in, has no capital letters and only one punctuation mark, so she carries those rules into English as a tribute to her mother tongue. Every word sits at the same height.
Then notice the line breaks. She performs her poems on stage, and the breaks work like breaths: each one marks a pause, and the period, when it comes, marks a new idea. Many poems end with an italic title placed beside her name, a final word that tells you who the poem is for or what it's about. And there's usually a simple line drawing, which does part of the talking.
Try this as you go: read each poem once silently on Instagram, then once out loud. You'll hear where she wants you to stop.
The women who came before us
The women on the stage with her
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
This is one of her longer pieces, and it's about inheritance. Kaur imagines "five hundred thousand voices" of the women before her rising up through her as she performs, until she can't tell where she ends and they begin. In her caption she says it came from looking out at audiences and thinking about her grandmothers, who never learned to read or got to choose their own lives. It's on page 157 of home body (2020).
What lands is the humility. Your confidence was paid for.
legacy
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Here the speaker thinks about the generations of women whose sacrifices lift her up, and wonders what she can add, how she might work "to make this mountain taller" for whoever comes next. The poem turns gratitude into a job description. It's short, and the drawing carries the idea of height and lifting.
One poem looks back, this one looks forward. So ask yourself: what's one thing you could make easier for a younger woman this week?
progress
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Four lines and one plain wish: that the women who follow us go further than we did, in every field. There's no metaphor here at all, just a statement, and that's the craft move. Kaur trusts the idea to stand on its own.
We love how unselfish it is. Being outdone becomes the goal.
The women beside us
sisters
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
This is a poem about being looked after when you've fallen apart, and about who it is that turns up. The repetition does the emotional work, the same three words returning like a hand on your back. Kaur dedicates it, in her caption, to her community of sisters, and calls that love the essence of home body, where it appears on page 166.
If someone carried you like this, tell them today. A two-line text counts.
medicine
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Four short lines about where the love we're missing should come from, and the answer is other women. The title is the argument: love between women, and love for ourselves, is treatment. Kaur shared it as page 228 of the sun and her flowers (2017).
Feminism isn't only about how men see us. A lot of it is about how we see each other.
Bodies, beauty and the compliments we give
The apology to women she called pretty
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
This is an apology, and an unusual one. The speaker owns up to a habit of praising women's looks first, and promises to start noticing their strength and what they've achieved instead. Kaur says in her caption that she wrote it in her journal in March 2014 and was amazed when women made it their own.
It works because it starts with the speaker's own habit, not someone else's. Try it: the next compliment you give, make it about something the person did.
The guest, not the home
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
A boyfriend comments on the hair growing back on the speaker's legs, and the poem answers with a metaphor: her body is the house, and "he is a guest". The short, choppy lines feel like a raised eyebrow. Kaur shared it as page 165 of milk and honey.
The image does what an argument can't. Once you picture him as a guest, you know exactly what's out of line.
Live loud and proud
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Three blunt lines, and one of them includes a swear word aimed at the rules for how a woman is supposed to look. It's a slogan and it knows it, a poem built to be shouted rather than studied. Kaur's caption adds the softer thought behind it: there's no single definition, and that's the beauty of us. It's page 160 of home body.
Voice, power and the stories we carry
women of color
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
If we could keep only one poem from this list, it might be this one. In five tiny lines it says the stories women of color carry on their backs weigh more than any book could carry, and it plays on the word spine, the spine of a back and the spine of a book. It appears on page 163 of milk and honey. In this post's caption, Kaur writes about the Sikh widows of Delhi who survived the violence of 1984 and what they taught her about resilience.
Read it twice. The pun is the whole poem, and it hurts.
The greatest lesson
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
This poem is a question and an answer, set out like an interview. The answer is about self-sufficiency: nothing was ever missing in her, and the sense of lack was taught from outside. In her caption Kaur describes a morning practice: close your eyes, be still, acknowledge your power, then start the day.
That's a practice you can borrow tomorrow morning. Two minutes, eyes closed, before the phone.
never be quiet
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
A man treats her strong views as a flaw, and the poem turns the insult around into proof of how big her thinking is. The title does the rest, and it reads like an instruction to every woman who swallowed what she meant to say in a meeting or a family argument. It's page 163 of home body.
So here's yours. The next time you feel yourself shrinking a sentence, say the full version.
Where to read her
Instagram is where many of us met these poems, but they were written to live together in books. Kaur's collections are milk and honey (2014), the sun and her flowers (2017) and home body (2020), all published by Andrews McMeel, plus Healing Through Words (2022), a book of guided writing exercises, and Love Poems by Rupi Kaur (2026), a collection of love poems gathered from the first three books.
You'll find every edition on Rupi Kaur's own website, along with her tour dates. If you can, buy from your local bookshop. Poets live on book sales, not likes.
If these poems moved you, our guides to Rupi Kaur's self-love poems and to milk and honey are good next stops. Then go and tell a woman in your life what she's done, not how she looks. We're all standing on someone's shoulders, and we're all carrying someone.
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