The poet Lorna Goodison explores several themes in her poem “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength).” However, the most prominent theme is love. In this poem, the speaker tells the story of her mother, from the time she fell in love with her father to the time her father died. Consider how the very first line of the poem makes one thing clear:

My mother loved my father
I write this as an absolute.

The second line tells the reader that the speaker is absolutely sure of how her mother felt. Her forceful tone here immediately frames this poem as a story about love, no matter what happens.

And as the reader soon learns, the love between the speaker's mother and father was complicated. At first, she tells the story of how her parents met and how her father “wooed” her mother and the two of them were happy. But then she explains how she remembers her mother, how her mom sewed and raised nine children, and how her father always came home late. Her father took a “friend,” which implies that he cheated on her mother. But even after he died her mother was “adamant” that this had “no place” in his memory. In the end, her mother realizes she no longer has to be brave and cries. The speaker recounts several reasons why she cries and then the poem ends with a line that recalls the first:

And she cried also because she loved him.

Thus, while this was not an easy marriage, the mother's continued devotion to her husband was at its core out of unconditional love for him. This poem thus suggests that unconditional love requires bravery and can often involve sacrifice and pain.