Mothers: In The Green Garden Poem by Thabani Khumalo

We should have been raised a lot better.
Over the years,
our mothers told us to always look out for danger,
we lingered and waited but the danger didn't pitch,
until we hung it up and the gauntlet we dropped,
turned dangerous just to feel the mass of the thrill,
for the danger we kept looking out for, we didn't see.
We began to taunt each other into dangerous rage,
we carried on into a brand new dangerous war
and painted the moon red without fear or guilt.

We dug up the ground for its mineral soil,
we burned it in the fiery furnace until, at last,
the iron within was smelted and run into the mould,
we wrought it on a stone without the anvil and shaped all up
into a very dangerous mighty robber's arm.

We fought frantically and made our mothers glow with sparkling pride -
for we had acted in the way they had trained us all our lives -
by taking the pain and sticking it back to the vicious fight,
we killed many people than we can remember we were ever taught to count;
we killed men we did not care to bury under honorable graves.

The mud gradually flooded between our toes
and kept on rising to cover and bury the knees -
and going up with each effort like a quicksand...
the blood of our young brothers having spilt in the riotous scourge
onto the ground like the drops of the heavy rain's precipitate.
Our mothers trained us to murder,
we murdered our own true brothers we grew with
because of women who had been living in the past...
while the garden was green.