The Power of a Smile

A love poem that begins with a gun: in The Power of a Smile, Tupac sets a smile against the forces of the world. The lines are among the shortest love poems in The Rose That Grew from Concrete. Tupac simply headed them “4 Renee”.

In the same section of the book, “Nothing Can Come Between Us”, is Genesis (The Rebirth of My Heart), which is dedicated to “Renee Ross”. Whether both poems are addressed to the same person seems likely, but is unproven. Nothing certain is known about Renee herself.

A gun kills, her smile heals

The poem is built as an enumeration. Line by line, Tupac names what each force can do: a gun can kill, fire burn, wind chill, the mind learn, and anger rage until it tears a person apart from within. The sequence moves from the outside in: from violence and nature to thought and emotion. Only in the final two lines does the turn come. Set against all of this is the smile-and specifically hers-that can heal a frozen heart.

The very first force Tupac names is a gun. For a teenager from Marin City around 1990, that was no abstract image. The poem does not counter everyday violence with something grand, but with something very small.

The counter-reckoning to the frozen heart

The motif of the frozen heart connects the poem to When Ure Heart Turns Cold, in which Tupac describes how indifference turns a person to ice from within. The Power of a Smile is something like the counter-reckoning: what appears there as a condition with no way out can be thawed here through affection. This interpretation emerges from comparing the texts, not from any statement by Tupac.

There is no exact date. According to the foreword by Afeni Shakur, the poems in the book were written between 1989 and 1991.

More about the book and all poems in the introduction.