the sun and her flowers - page 76
As a reader, to imagine these things Kaur describes is sickening and frustrating. Her body has been violently marked by someone else without her consent. By starting the poem with soft words and a calm setting, an intense juxtaposition is made between that and the horror of the last lines, which reflects the mindset of a victim. Imagine a woman, dirty and scarred from the experience she just had, coming home and the first thing she wants to do is treat herself to a warm and healing bath. That shows much strength and poise; yet the traumatic emotions are still evident as the poem proceeds. This set up of the poem could be a metaphor for the mental steps that follow a sexual assault event – the scene of the bath could align with actions that are taken to try to forget and ignore what happened, but then the “howling” combines the sadness and terror along with the graphic physical descriptions, and the end resembles a cry for help: “the fourth hour i prayed” (76). Through the changing tone of this poem, readers experience the raw and genuine feelings that Kaur intends to express in order to portray the realities of sexual assault.