ONCE WE WERE LIGHT

Once we were light
But the world weighed us down
Drowned out our cry of resistance
And put a bandage over our eyes

A desperate cry for help
Before we fell silent
And started to look silently at our children
The way once our parents looked at us

Now we know what they were thinking:
Retain your magic! Retain your lightness!
Even as they said to us worriedly:
You have to learn to fit into the system –

Knowing it was not the way
But knowing no other way
Or knowing it but not having the heart
To push us off the cliff –

Because not everybody grows wings
When falling through the gap.
The generation gap.
Now we watch our children worriedly

Wanting them to become like us
And wanting them to stay themselves too.
Once we were light
But the world weighed us down.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

USING SELF-CONFIDENCE

The most powerful thing you can give people is confidence. Self-confidence. But some people, once they have it they turn around and use it against you, who awakened it in them.

Next time, you feel like leaving people wallowing in their pitiful inferiority complex.

But a part of you still goes ahead and keeps on strengthening people who need it everywhere you meet them. What they later do with this strength and self-confidence is their business.

You have done yours.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

POEMS DON‘T CHANGE

Places change people
People change places
Places change people
People change places

Races change people
People change races
Races change people
People change races

Faces change people
People change faces
Faces change people
People change faces

The person who started this poem
Is not the person who finished it.
Poems change people –
But people don‘t change poems.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

BOYS TO MEN

The older I get,
The more I miss my father.
The more knowing I grow,
The more I miss him.
The more I know him.
The more I understand him.
We live life forwards,
But understand life backwards.
When it‘s too late to change anything,
That’s when we understand everything.
The young shall grow.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
(I just feel like remembering today)

YESTERDAY’S FACES

YESTERDAY, IT WAS as beautiful as the early morning sunlight dancing upon a rose. My heart was not my heart, but myself; and my face was not my face, but the shimmering reflection of my heart.

As I was striding once, I saw a figure hovering in the Air. But she had no wings, only the longest, most gleaming braids I ever saw, but gleaming not as bright as her eyes, eyes a-smiling straight into mine.

“Come, my friend,” called she to me in voice of purest gold, “Follow me awhile and I will show you distant places of light and harmony, yes indeed I will!”

I nodded and right there and then her words lifted me up into the magic-coloured sky where, I by her side, we flew over two crystal mountains and one silver lake and then hovered a while above a garden where children wiser than the wisest men were building beautiful castles not in the air or sand, but inside their own hearts.

And then we flew off once again and this time when we paused, a circle of beautiful winged horses with talking eyes came flying up to meet us. We mounted two and journeyed on… but where we went from there I know not anymore, for I have lost my memories of then…

Because now I wonder, like one blind, in the dark and earthly worlds of modern men. And ever, when the sun is a-dawning, or a-shinning but not burning, though it be noon, or a-setting down, I ever and again go on long, gentle strolls, as though I were trying to recapture that glorious journey which I barely remember…

And today as I wandered through dingy markets I saw a face… a woman selling decaying fish, eyes materialistic and cunning, impure seduction. Of course she was not that beautiful Maiden of my all but forgotten past.

So why then does she look so familiar? And what was it that startled her when our eyes touched? Unsettled her. But of course she cannot be that same beautiful female spirit of ancient days who I left up in glorious heights yesterday…

I hope.

– che chidi chukwumerije..