the sun and her flowers

Self-empowerment is a motif, or recurring element, which appears throughout the book. The speaker yearns for freedom and independence; she does not want to be subject to the whims or desires of others. In Chapter 1, when she is grieving her loss, this yearning makes only a faint appearance, but it is observable, nonetheless. In “what love looks like” (30-33), which describes a session with her therapist, she tries out various definitions of love (“love is giving all we can” [33], for example) and concludes that “love is knowing whom to choose” (33), a statement that might be said to initiate her quest for self-empowerment: the need to make good choices.

The glimmer of self-empowerment can also be sensed in the poem that follows “not your hobby,” in which the speaker asserts, “I have too many miracles / happening inside me / to be your convenient option” (34). Although it is hard for her when she experiences her loss so acutely (“your absence is a missing limb” [44]), even then she knows the right question to ask: “how do i turn around and choose myself” (from the poem that begins with “where do we go from here my love” [49]). The soon-to-emerge stronger self can be heard again in Chapter 2, when the speaker states in the poem that begins with “you were mine,” that even though she has lost her beloved, “my life is full” (83). If self-empowerment involves developing qualities such as self-understanding, self-reliance, self-awareness, and self-confidence, she is inching her way toward it. She knows that it is a long process: “there is no end point / […] healing is everyday work” (poem that begins with “I woke up thinking that the work was done” [110]). In “self-love,” she rids herself of negative, self-limiting words and actions, the “i can’ts. i won’ts. i am not good enoughs” (105). In the untitled three-line poem “I will welcome / a partner / who is my equal” (159), she asserts her own worth, an act of self-empowerment. She also knows that only when she realizes her own self-sufficiency will she be able to uplift other women and offer love to the entire world. Thus, in “what is the greatest lesson a woman should learn,” the speaker states in answer to the question posed that the lesson is, “since day one / she’s already had everything she needs within herself” (233).