PoemPart "Nothing Can Come Between Us"
If There Be Pain...
A promise to be there: Tupac offers support whenever the other person suffers-and lets his own loneliness shine through in a single line.
- Book
- The Rose That Grew from Concrete (1999)
- Part
- Nothing Can Come Between Us
- Original text
- not reproduced (copyright); see the book
Whoever is hurting should reach out: unconditionally and without hesitation. With this promise, Tupac opens If There Be Pain…, one of the simplest love poems in the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete. It appears in the second section, “Nothing Can Come Between Us”, and carries no dedication. Who is meant remains open.
The One Who Promises Comfort Ends Up in the Rain Himself
Tupac structures the poem as an offer. Twice he begins with the same condition: if there is pain, the other should reach out. For this, the first stanza draws on a very everyday image, the telephone: before the call is even hung up, the loneliness is supposed to be over. The second stanza grows larger and more physical: offering support no matter where, every breath for the other.
In the penultimate line, the perspective suddenly shifts to the speaker himself: his life, he says, has passed in falling rain. The comforter is thus someone who knows comfort himself and misses it. This reversal appears frequently in the book. In Sometimes I Cry, Tupac laments that no one stops to help; here, he wants to be exactly that person.
Written in Marin City, Set to Music in 2000
The book gives no date. According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991, when Tupac lived in Marin City and wrote in Leila Steinberg’s writing circle. Nothing more precise is documented.
The phrase “if there be pain” also reappears in So I Say GOODBYE, there as a readiness to accept pain for love. On the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), Providence and RasDaveed El Harar set the verses to music.
More on the book and all the poems are gathered in the introduction.