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.
What fear is it that colonises us as we advance and infects us with the thirst for safety? Why, how does it conquer us? Why do we yield to the fear of the unknown? Were we always seeking the valley and never the mountain-peak? Was this always our secret goal? Or did we fall somewhere, and hide thereafter behind a smile and a serious frown or the line in-between, shutting our eyes carefully so that the world would not be bothered much by the sight of the decaying of our most cherished dream?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
It’s just life
No pause
Inescapable laws
No brakes
No breaks
No breaking out – you’re done in
Few gives, few takes
The dark is near
It is in there
It’s always there
It’s just life
You pay the price – that’s your role
There is a myth, a legend
A hurt-filled, painful, word
They call it love
There are no guarantees
But they say
It will set you free – nothing more
It won’t bring you wealth
It won’t bring you power
It’s just life
Keep it warm
Keep it safe
Keep it alive – love – it’ll keep you alive.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
To encompass a mighty tale
Within the letters of a little poem
Little sentence, little phrase
One little word
To start with the clue and end with the question
To give the world in every act
To live a life never lived before
By you.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
The hot burning
The lust turning you on
The engine churning
The drive yearning to come
Intuition discerning
Twixt the journeying weeper
And the earning
Of the learning reaper.
– che chidi chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 