My mother passed away 20 years ago. Yet, I can’t explain why the more time passes by, the deeper my love is for her. Our separation between this world and the afterworld can’t stop the love growing. I think my mother saves such a love for me day and night while she is leading another life in the afterworld, too. I feel as if she were waiting for a weary long time for me, her only beloved son, who had been fighting in remote southern forests of Vietnam in wartime. Her tears silently fell down each night without acknowledgment of any body.  Who did think of a sacred but simple day like the Mother’s Day?

In such the day just for mothers and their children, we suddenly remember to  lines of simple verse written by Xuan Dieu, a famous Vietnamese poet: “Whatever in the world is greater than love of a mother for her children? Whatever in the world is more delicious than a simple meal with rice and fish cooked by the mother?”. The verse moves readers to tears because it is so simple. It is as simple as the maternal love, as the meal with the rice and the fish. I still keep an old moving emotion when reading a short note hastily written by my mother. At that time, I was sitting in a two-row railroad car heading to the southern front. The scrawl made me guess that she had written the note in tears. That is probably the only note in her life for her only son in one morning of a coming Tet festival. In my living memory, I saw many bicyclists riding on a national road which ran parallel with the railway, carrying home newly-bought jam-jars and branches of peach flowers to celebrate Tet while I was reading the note. It was drizzling and sorrowfully cold at the end of the lunar year in Hanoi at that time. I felt as if my mother was very far away from me although the train had just left Thanh Tri railway station in Hanoi. She reminded me of keeping good health and added: “I send you a jar of shredded, salted and dried chicken so that you remember me whenever you share eat it with your comrades”.

I had been keeping the note as the most valuable belongings of mine during many wartime years. But, I lost it with a notebook in which I had written many poems of mine in a 1973 battle against enemies in the southern province of My Tho. It is no exaggeration to say that I become a poet because of my mother. I cannot but compose poems because I have such a devoted mother who silently stood sacrifices and hardships, whose legacy was nothing but the son, the daughter-in-law and two small grandchildren at the time of her decease. If all lines of verse composed by human beings about their mothers were connected together, they could have been long enough to circle round the earth. No person haven’t experienced at least once in his life a certain sudden moment of happy memories about his mother, about simple but great mutual love between the mother and her child. “ Sweet banana is on the table. Sweet and gentle hands of my mother is caressing on my back”. That’s my feeling about my mother after a 40-year-long existence in this life. Even Che Lan Vien, a Vietnamese poet famous for his sophisticated poetic style, composes very simple lines of verse about his mother: “How grown up I am, I will always be a little child of my mother. How far and bumpy is the journey of the life, she will always follow me”. The mother, in deed, will follow and love her children for all of her life, even when she doesn’t  exists in this world any longer.

How great is the love without any limit, without any barrier of this real life and the afterlife! How eternal is the love!

People all over the world think of the Mother’s Day probably because they realize the love of their mothers. It is the day for a person to relive the  simple but marvelous life-time memories about his own mother: her gentle look, her hands, her voices, her images. A day just for the mothers.

• Written by Thanh Thao
• Translated by To Uyen