Tears of a Teenage Mother

No dedication, terse verses, and a single artistic device: Tears of a Teenage Mother pits two worlds against each other. In the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete, the short poem appears in the third section, “Just a Breath of Freedom,” placed among the political poems.

The Father Brags, the Baby Has No Milk

Each pair of lines juxtaposes the father and the baby. He brags about his new Jordans while the baby runs out of milk. He buys gold every two weeks, yet the baby runs out of diapers. He buys clothes for his new girlfriend, and the baby lacks medicine. In the final line, the pattern breaks: when the mother asks for money for the child, the father is out the door.

The title speaks of the mother’s tears, yet she herself barely appears in the poem. It is precisely this void that makes the text powerful: her situation emerges entirely from what is missing.

The Same Theme Also Shapes “Brenda’s Got a Baby”

Exactly when Tupac wrote these lines is not recorded. According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poems were written between 1989 and 1991. The same theme is addressed in his single Brenda’s Got a Baby from 2Pacalypse Now (1991): the story of a girl left behind alone with a baby. Keep Ya Head Up (1993) also speaks to mothers abandoned by the fathers of their children. Whether the poem was written before or after the song is not known.

Tupac himself grew up without a father, raised by his mother. He addresses this background directly in If I Fail.

On the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), the poem ultimately found a voice as well: there, actress Jasmine Guy reads the text.

More on the book in the introduction.