Before
Watching the Video
What is
TED?
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is
a global set of conferences run by the private nonprofit organization Sapling Foundation, under the slogan
"Ideas Worth Spreading". TED was founded in February 1984 as a
one-off event the annual conference series began in 1990. TED's early
emphasis was technology and design, consistent with its Silicon
Valley origins, but it has since broadened its focus to include
talks on many scientific, cultural, and academic topics.
If I Should Have a Daughter
A performing poet since she was 14 years old, Sarah
Kay is the founder of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word
poetry as a literacy and empowerment tool.
Subtitles and Transcript
Translation
After Watching the Video
Exercise 1
Add
the 12 missing words to the boxes below:
Missing
Words
• Pain
• Universe
• Hurt
• Boat
• Taste
• Mother
• Crumble
• Chocolate
• Kissing
• Disappointment
• Bruises
• Stomach
• Poem
If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s
gonna call me Point B,
because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always
find her way to me.
And I’m going to paint solar systems on the back of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire _1_ before
she can say,
“Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”
And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face,
wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the _2_.
But getting the wind knocked out of you is
the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the _3_of air.
There is _4_ here that cannot
be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming,
I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself.
Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the _5_ you want to heal.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
“And, baby,” I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that. I know
that trick, I’ve done it a million times.
You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back
to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire
to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first
place,
to see if you can change him.”
But I know that she will anyway,
so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of _6_ and rain boats nearby,
because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix.
Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix.
But that’s what the rain boots are for.
Because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom _7_,
to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a
human mind,
because that’s how my mom taught me.
That there’ll be days like this.
“They’ll be day’s like this, my momma said.”
When you open your hands to catch
and wind up with only blisters and _8_,
when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly
and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape,
when your boots will fill with rain, and you’ll be up to your knees in _9_.
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.
Because there is nothing more beautiful than the way
the ocean refuses to stop _10_ the
shoreline,
no matter how many times it’s swept away.
You will put the wind in winsome, lose some.
You will put the star in starting over, and over.
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute,
be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale of one to over-trusting,
I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know
that this world is made out of sugar.
It can _11_ so easily, but
don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
“Baby,” I’ll tell her, “remember, your mama is a worrier,
and your papa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands
and big eyes who never stops asking for more.”
Remember that good things come in threes
and so do bad things. And always apologize when you’ve done something wrong.
But don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don’t ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you heartache,
when they slip war and hatred under your door
and offer you hand-outs on street-corners of cynicism and defeat,
you tell them that they really ought to meet your _12_.
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