My Favorite Writing

Word Count: 252

Tupac Shakur's poem, "Jada", from his book The Rose That Grew from Concrete grabbed my heart the first time I read it when I was a sophomore in high school.

And now six years later, it still continues to pull at my heart strings.

Shakur expresses his heartfelt emotions for his friend Jada (a.k.a. Jada Pinkett Smith) in the poem.

At the beginning of the poem, the reader may sense that she is his lover.

However, at the end of the poem, we see that she is a close, dear friend.

Although he does use sexual references, he in no way expresses his feelings through sex which is quite refreshing to me since relationships today seem to focus so much on sex.

Jada is his heart and his words express his feelings perfectly.

While Shakur's style may not be traditional, I feel that I can feel his emotions jumping right off of the page -as if I were there with him reading every detail and thought running through his brain.

Shakur is known for his "roughness" as a rapper but I feel that there is so much more to him.

After reading many of his poems, I feel that his whole rap star persona was a front while the "real" him sat in the background.

I feel that the real Tupac Shakur was not the "bad boy" that the media portrayed him as.

Instead, he was just another man with a big heart -a heart that loved his family, friends, and women.


Shakur, Tupac. The Rose That Grew from Concrete. 1st. New York: Pocket Books, 1999. 88-89. Print.