A canoe is floating on a Lagos lagoon
A young lad in a face cap
Holds in his fist a fishing net
He looks briefly over at me
Looks away again
We met and parted in that look
The bus drove off
A brief moment of contact
I could almost swear
We understood each other completely
Without words
Though we think us dead,
We live.
Though we think we different
We more similar than we think.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
SOMETIMES THE night is so incredibly beautiful, I wish it would last a little longer tonight. Everywhere, everything is so soft. The night air is cool, soft. The vibration of the world, of my neighbourhood, has lost its harshness and it seems as though everybody loves everybody tonight. And I am glad again that I was born a poet.
I will live a poet and when I die, the world will say: a poet is gone. And if the world mourns, then I will be glad I disappointed the world and became a poet instead of a lawyer, engineer, banker, doctor, scientist, professor emeritus.
The poem that I wanted to write on the day I took the decision and forsook the world, I have now forgotten. Forgotten if I even wrote it at all or whether I kept it back in, bolted up in the hall of silence in my soul, where I continued to nourish it, and perhaps only wrote it another day in another poem, or maybe I’ve not even written it yet.
And yet, for its sake, and for the sake of a thousand and more poems yet unwritten, I disobeyed, ignored and disappointed the world, I dropped out of school, forsook a supposedly great destiny and became just a poet struggling to get by.
And yet I know, when I die they will say wistfully, with wet eyes: a poet is gone…
And they will feel it in their hearts. –
So poets are special afterall.
Sometimes the night is so beautiful and I wish it would last a little longer tonight, and I’m glad I was born a poet. Even when I’m dead and gone I’ll leave behind upon the sad earth a few lines that will forever move human hearts and they will nod thoughtfully and say: once upon a time, a poet was born… he lived on earth, he wrote poems and he died…
They will say this because poems don’t die and, in truth, poets too are immortal. None is so immortal as they that cook with letters, build with words and touch us not with fingers or lips, pictures or songs, as precious as these are, for who can live without love and kindness, music and art, but there is a special quality of perception that works wonders and magic within us when language, this device we so casually misuse and abuse everyday, is made into the container and preserver for generations to come of something that goes right into our core and makes us glad that the poet did not fail to write once upon a time.
And last night it was so beautiful. I was all alone and only once was I called upon, in the night, by the rain… it was at my window, poetic, heavenly, cold, sweet and temporary… it passed away, and took with it the last traces of the receding harmattan.
And I hoped the night would for once last a little longer last night, yet knew my hope was folly. Twice I slept anew, twice awoke, and the night was still with us and still so soft, and I thought of you, in the night.
And I slept again and when I opened my eyes the sun was shinning, the night is gone and I began to write this story of all that happens and happens never, but remembered ever by the works of the poetic spirit.
Birds are chirping. People are yapping outside my window too. Lagos is beautiful only at night when NEPA provides us with electricity and the fan or A/C is working, or else it needs must rain and the roof better not be leaking. But if you are lucky, you have a generator. Or a guitar. Best of all of course is the cooling cooling rain.
That is when Lagos is most beautiful. When the Water falls…
I thirst after you
Waterfall
I want to
Drink you up
I am
The quivering starving lake
Underneath the Souls of
Your feet
Step on me
I will carry you to your river
I am your horizon
You are my ocean.
The reading is taking place next Saturday. Who will be there? Nobody I know, naturally. Of course they will all think I know them and they know me. We will shake hands and call one another by our names and remember some incidents from the populous empty past.
Yet I know them not and they know me not. We are all strangers to one another. This is the city, where neighbours and friends and strangers are all strangers to one another, and the city is the strangest one of all amongst us, the laughing, mute, cunning, open, mocking, sorrowing city. Community of strangers and, maybe, one friend for a little while, once in a while. Baby, are you still my friend? Friendship dies in the night when no-one is looking and no-one can say later exactly what went wrong.
Why are people always staring? In the bus, on the streets, everywhere. They point their eyes at one and STARE! Walking with her, she said I’ve learnt to ignore them. Well, I haven’t.
I remember, many years ago, when I was a teenager, someone said to me: you’ve got to learn to either soften the look in your eyes or desist from looking too strongly into girl’s eyes. You confuse them. You make them think you’re in love with them. You invite them to fall in love with you. You seem to promise them eternal, warm, caring love with your eyes.
I smiled, slightly confused. But I knew she must know what she was saying. She was my cousin and knew my eyes and what lies ever behind them.
We went to the library, to check up on the progress and make final arrangements. I got there first. Everything, like almost always in Nigeria, is being rushed through in the last moments. The reading is on Saturday. Yesterday was Monday, full of freshly awakened poetry. Everybody full of new lines, composed in their hearts over the weekend, strutting upon the stage, playing their parts, artistically, as though it wasn’t all an act. Yesterday was Monday.
Monday, some say, is a slow day. Others say it is a fast day, hectic, with everything happening too fast for them to follow. It is, for some, a hard day, for others a dreamy one. Monday is an okay day, I guess. Afterall Monday is Sunday’s child. Beautiful, deep Sunday. Land of answers.
She looked charged full of energy, as always. We collected the requisite material, first from the library, then from the publisher, then picked up a part of the decoration and headed for the venue. We spoke of this and that along the way, but said more with silence and thought thoughts than with words, spoken words. We really are close, a closeness many people would not understand. They would think of other things, as usual. And miss the very point.
We separate along the way, and meet again at the sponsors’ and then return to the venue for the press conference.
Flow up and be free and be happy forever.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
from THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE, by Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Water water everywhere
Why is the world full of water?
The earth like a primeval bowl
Has been filled with water from a pitcher
Tilted down over a heavenly shoulder
High above the material sphere
Where love flows everywhere
Where the spirits never thirst
Where the urge to help alone comes first –
Take me there, take me there, take me there.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
If you of a barren eager day switch on the television, assuming that NEPA has provided electricity, and observe the movements of those dancers called politicians, you will before you know it begin to dance along.
If you of a quiet sleepless night switch on your memory, assuming your heart is strong enough to bear this, and remember the days of your emotional sighs and bonds, you will before you know it begin to yearn again for those things for which you have always yearned the most deep within your heart.
And if you of a broken moment in time, broken open, long again for me, I promise you that I will be there, sweetheart. But you must long from the deepest part of you, the part you kept hidden when you told me all those unnecessary lies. And you will, before you know it, have outgrown me and my poems.
It’s not me you love, my dear, you were merely enraptured by the poet in me – and I am a poet.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The punishment for being brave
Is having nothing to do
But be brave –
A tidal wave is rising in my soul.
The reward for being brave
Is having to do nothing
But be brave –
A tidal wave is crashing in my soul.
She warmed her cold tongue with
The flaming words of a passionate poet and
Lashed a gutter of decadent lava on
My soul.
Yet I told her still the truth
Again and again and again
And again and again, again
And again.
– che chidi chukwumerije
What holds people together and transforms animosity into love, distrust into cooperation, disunity into lively oneness? What melts the old barriers and creates new ones? What overcomes us and flows over us? What ever came over us? What is our goal? What can make us agree where once we disagreed?
A force, like a violent wind, whips us away from the old way and whisks us into the new. All we have to do is try. Things end, things begin anew, old things go, new things come, we shall live if we are ready to change.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Where she is is home,
Hope, I shall no longer roam
Any further, she’s my world,
My home, around me curled,
Unfurled, wanting me bad,
I, this never-ending fairy-lad.
Home, where she is is
Home, hope, land of bliss, is
Where I stay, I roam no more,
I return home and want no more.
– che chidi chukwumerije
I don’t know if you’ve heard
There is a land where girls were stolen
Kidnapped it’s called in sociopolitical speak
That land happens to be my country
Those girls another set of casualties
In a war of religion and education
Let’s just call it a war on humanity
The candles are going out
From one country to the next
Some swear the second world war is not yet over
Others boast the cold war is far from done
Meanwhile an old war has long begun
Some call this the third world war
The last one apparently Nostradamus encrypted
For sure it is a religious war on faith
Everyday it opens up a new field of battle
Now it has picked on my country too
And made her the new local theater of a global scourge
But how do you win a religious war?
By killing, or by forgiving?
By retaliating or by reconciling?
It is a philoshical puzzle
A paradox of semantics
In which real people die everyday.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
After the Still of the Night, if you are listening, you will notice that the birds have begun to twitter, the dogs have started to bark, the cocks to crow. Looking out the window, you will notice that the sky is a tinge less dark and the stars and moon, though clearly visible still, strangely are fast fading too. You will not see the sun yet, but a stranger within you will tell you that the sun is stirring somewhere over an eastern horizon, and the world is waiting with a heart full of wonder, holding its breath, and every yawn is an awakening not a retiring. A quiet energy begins to brew, like a yearning.
Opening your heart, you will perceive that the heavenly song, echoing still on within you, retreating, has faded quietly quietly away again. And, your open heart still open, you will perceive that the harsher vibrations of an embattled intellectual species, human by name, are surging out once more – through windows, doors, walls and hearts and reawakening chaotic minds, through opening unseeing eyes and resettling restless souls, bodies crashing densely out of bed, self-locked plans and plots in mind, they prepare to explode upon the planet, yes, ready and about to punish a guiltless world again with another day of desperate madness starting now just when nature and the natural world would so deeply like to smile the smile of dawn.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The hidden feather
There and not there
Fluttering, silent, soft
Bearing a great thing aloft.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 