Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Your mom loves you so much. When she looks at you growing up, her heart fills. She calls you 'mine' and it's real — it's one of the most genuine feelings in the world.
But Kabir is pointing to something underneath that love. While she sees you growing, something else is happening at the same time: every single day, the time you have on this earth is getting a little shorter. Life isn't just expanding — it's also counting down.
And the Messenger of Death — the force that will one day come for everyone — watches all this loving and all this 'mine mine' business, and laughs. Not meanly. But because the mother doesn't see what the Messenger sees. She sees growth. He sees the clock.
This is not a sad poem about mothers. It is an honest poem about Maya — the enchanting illusion that makes permanent things out of things that change, and makes 'mine' out of things that were never ours to keep.
Kabir opens with one of the most piercing images in the Bhagat tradition: the mother's love — the most tender, most unselfish love humans know — becomes an image of Maya's blindness. It is not the mother's fault. Maya does not attack us through our worst impulses; it attacks us through our best ones. Through the love for our children. Through the word 'mine.' And the Messenger of Death, who sees past the illusion, is amused — not cruelly, but because he knows something the mother does not: the clock has always been running.
Is there something or someone in your life you hold so tightly as 'mine' that you've stopped noticing how time moves past it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI