With A Grievous Loss Poem by Thabani Khumalo

With a grievous loss
comes an insatiable lust for unfair gain.
With looming death rises a dear love for life.
A woman lost many children to a massacre of oblivion,
she learned to love her grand child
with her fullest wind and to hold nothing back.
Perhaps age is a perfect healer
of the accumulated childhood trauma,
but any number that's come with a seven in it
has revived many memories of my grueling losses.

I revert to the loss of December in 2007
and a tear suddenly runs over to hit the ground -
rapidly falling off my deep-brown eyes.
I find no clever way to colloquially avoid flying in
the high altitude of these traumas of the past.

I find no way to allude
the effect of this matter on any day.
I feel as though my heart is tumid;
as if it gushes blood to the olfactory sensor,
it smells as if I'm going to asphyxiate and die.
I need to give away a little time for this trauma to settle.
I don't know if I am going to be able to evade this pain at all,
but I will survive at my best till I laugh out last in solitude.