We are so strongly influenced
By the form of what we see
That we lose sight of a sense
Of what its true content could be
Who would ever guess
That in a cocoon sleeps a butterfly
Or that the greatest devil of all
Looks like an angel in the sky?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
And this a wanderer said to me
The mountains will awaken mountains in you
And the rivers will make a more thoughtful
Traveller of you.
The seasons will change you as frequently
As they change – and your new selves
Will not remember the person
You used to be.
And when you come back home again,
Sadness, quietness and joy will overcome you
And everything you left on the road
Will be as a dream.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I carry with me only a pouch of hope
A flinch of salt for my daily bread
My shadows falter; my wings, they grope
For space, where seekers dread to tread
My sandals are poised to strike the sand
A grain of pain is universe
But when I prise open deep my hand
The lines of blessing write off any curse
In leaps and bounds my mountains guide me
When the moon is barking, my shadows hide me
Pauselessly, hard, intuitions ride me.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Ada slipped open the sixth and final poem in the small collection –
YOUNG AGAIN –
Those were the words, that was the title.
“Were we ever young?”
“Did we ever age?”
Neither replied the other. Each had spoken for the other.
This last poem, for some reason, was italicised from first word to last. We shall be young one day again, younger than we ever were, young as ageless eternity. YOUNG AGAIN.
It becomes simple
Crosses threshold
Mortality into immortality
Denseness into quickness
Old into new, call it young
The good become older
Grow younger
Younger and younger and younger
The better you
Lighter and truer
Younger grow
Let us all grow young again
Fill the Earth with laughter
With truth, with youth –
Ngozi looked into Ada’s eyes and said:
“I want to see Tony again.”
There was a pause. But did a spell break somewhere quietly? Or were we never there?
“Do you have a telephone?” Ngozi pressed, trying to interpret Ada’s silence. It must mean something.
Suddenly Ada was taken aback.
A spell seemed indeed to abruptly lift itself off her and, in its place, her thinking cap, invisible on her head but visible in the sudden, guarded look in her eyes, treacherous windows, descended, full of fears and cleverness and innumerable bad memories, upon her. She was suddenly appalled at herself, and the last twenty minutes swiftly took on the aspect of a fairy-tale, a dream. Had it really happened? Who was this strange woman beside whom she was sitting, sharing the intimate poems of her brother with, like old friends. She experienced the sensation of having been swiftly disarmed and intruded upon, and even, oddly, deceived.
Her head moved back a fraction of a unit of precise measurement and re-appraised Ngozi with suspicious, half-friendly, half-unfriendly, unsure eyes. Like it was in the beginning. – Yes? Who are you?
The returning silence, cold and dividing, began to mature.
Ngozi suddenly understood Ada. She smiled tenderly. Into her handbag she reached, extracted a black, silver-capped pen and then a tiny slip of blue paper. Carefully she balanced the little paper on the side of her bag and, luckily, the bus was temporarily caught in a traffic-jam at Ijaiye. The type that Lagosians call the Standstill, in contradistinction to the Go-Slow and the Hold-up.
Quickly she wrote her name and telephone number down, then wordlessly handed it over to Ada.
“That’s my office telephone number. Please tell him I said Hi.” She smiled again, then turned her head forward; then turned back again, smiling even more disarmingly and added: “and, oh, by the way… Merry Christmas – one day in arrears.”
“Same to you too…”
Ngozi had turned her face away. She didn’t speak again. At the next bus-stop, Iyana-Meiran, she alighted from the bus and left a thoughtful Ada again without her presence, as it was in the beginning.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Part 6
Part 5
Part 4
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1
(This is the end of the excerpts. The whole book can be obtained via Amazon)
Read the full book:
There is no easy way
To walk through every valley
Without tasting any fruit
Without tasting any fruit
Propensity plays a gentle lute
Curiousity owns a magic flute
Temptation gnaws at your root
Intuition is loud, intuition is mute.
Who can know without taking a bite?
Who can grow without experiencing the night?
Some nights will yield the day
Some nights will kill the day
When does a want become a need?
When does a hunger morph into greed?
Is a sin a fruit or a seed?
A thought is sometimes worse than a deed.
There is a green hill far away
Your feet are confused: to go or to stay?
Who can walk through the valley of the root
Without tasting any fruit?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Works that stay
And show the way
To travelling spirits
On the right road
Long after I myself have passed
This way.
Not works of vanity
Nor dance of insanity
But honesty to my spirit
Who drank whilst thirsty
And knows the source of eternal water
The Grail’s Fountain.
Some seek politics
Some seek academics
Some believe in race issues
Some ideology or religion
And many will seek only pleasure
And self.
But through history
An inner mystery
Occupies all human spirits
It doesn’t die or fade –
The urge to know the true meaning of
The chalice, the stone, the mystery, the fountain,
The beginning, the origin, the genesis, the portal, the Grail.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
So the sun is yellow today
See that?
There – above the dark grey clouds
Beyond the mists and fog –
See that?
There – outside the boundary of your brooding thoughts
Beyond the clutches of your sorrow
If you look through your depression –
So plain to see,
The corner of your unsmiled smiles
Tugging at your lips
Lifting your lids – look, look
Above the tree tops in the jungle of your sadness –
Don’t you see?
The sun is golden yellow today.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
When they seek bread
You hesitate to speak
Of the bread of life
For they look you in the eye
And say
Can’t you see that I’m hungry?
How can you make
The spirit strong
When the body is still so weak?
And so you fall silent
And wait with the rest,
For the rest, in peace…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There will be brief sudden moments
Of big aching dreams, they will
Tear you out of darkest despair
Remind you of the throbbing urge
That is your second heart.
An unexpected warm sunny day in winter
That seems to say: Shivering spark, I am
Summer’s promise sent ahead of time
An emissary of hope, here to remind
You to keep the faith.
Strengthened by quietness
You face the dark, and you laugh
And you say: Deep, you are my cocoon
The womb of midnight wonder, from which
I shall emerge, your secret butterfly.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
He was my best friend
Yet when we parted
None gave news to the other
Of the path he charted
Where one went high
The other went low
And where one learned to lead
The other learned to follow.
She was a wild flower
But deep in her soul
She was a gentle morning
That made people whole
She fell in love with one
Then met the other
And fell for him too
Like he was her lover
Torn between a leader
And a follower
She learned with surprise that the higher
Is indistinguishable from the lower
The hunter is the hunted
The writer is the reader
The leader and the follower
Are both follower and leader.
He was my best friend
And though we walked separate ways
Destiny brought us together
Back to the same place.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 