How She Must Have Felt? Poem by Mpho Petrus Manwedi

She grabbed me roughly from my child sleep
And threw me on her back like a sack of mealies
She used to carry from the fields.
Her back was knotted with the hump in her heart
And I cried out when she tightened her cradle
She went out that early morning in the cold air of the Maluti Mountains
To that rock in the middle of the mealie patch
Where my father used to sit and play his tin guitar
And there she sobbed her heart out.
After a long while she noticed my wails and cries
She gently took me from her hunched back
And hugged me to her milky breasts.
Still with tears running from her pain-filled eyes she said to me,
“Son, your father is not coming back home anymore.
He has been eaten by the golden beast in the Deep Levels of Gauteng.”