Yet I Was A Quiet Little Child. Poem by Thabani Khumalo

I used to go to a snake inhabited mountain behind my grandfather`s home
and I'd sit alone naked at the very depth of a dark cave.
Yet I was a child,
I figured that life was about putting the body into play.

So in its absence,
I dozed off and fell asleep in the nest of a breathing creature that crawls.
Allow me a moment to ruminate fully on this weird memory
so I may sink into depth to the source of this questionable thought.
I was in the most probing spiritual temptation of blasphemous surrender.

Yet life is the act of correctly putting the body into play,
you should know how we did put our little bodies into play.
We played like high-risk circus stuntsmen.

We portrayed to ooze popular power by the minute -
Yet in the hinterlands, at a place that my grandfather chose
with his spirit filled with a smilingly induced love,
I learned to play hide and seek in a cave...
In the cave where an ancestor was tested by a big snake
until he ended its deadly life with his strength and his bare hands.

Yet I was a quiet little child.