Deep Love For A Mother Poem by Thabani Khumalo

It is funny
how I used to deeply love my mother.
It felt a certain way
right in the core of my guts,
it was something deep -
something inexplicable,
and we, as kids, where there -
in that degree of love.

Even when I had learned
that my father had died,
it didn't bother me at all
because mama was alive.

For a very-very long time in life -
that is if you are going to consider life in the amount of time
you'd discover that,
out of the number of years that I've existed -
there are more years into that kind of a thinking:
a deep love for a mother.
It was deep.

I couldn't stand the idea of...
just thinking, alone, about... losing my mother.

Even as a little boy, I'd prefer,
'should the need be, ' to die in my mother's place -
so that I die first -
because I didn't want to see my mother die.

That is how deep life can sometimes be,
it is beyond the fathom of a human brain.

But then things change...