Every day, like a mother,
delivers a new version of me
No matter what binds me today,
tomorrow I will be free.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river
Of Change
WHAT DO YOI REALLY WANT?
Imagine if the only way God could save you
Was by letting you continue to search and to suffer –
Would you still continue to beg Him to save you?
Or would you ask the devil to make you an offer?
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river
TAKE YOUR PAIN
Take your pain Don’t run from it Again and again Welcome it You will gain From the purge And after the rain A new you will emerge. Che Chidi Chukwumerije
EMERGING
The more my eyes fail
The better I see
The more my knees flail
The faster I flee
And the farther I go
I thought younger was stronger
But that was a long long time ago.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
EAGLE AT HEART
Sun-burnished
The sea slit
The morning lit up
Furnished my wit
The varnished mirror beneath me crawls
And over-yonder my sun it calls
Back tarnished memory bit by bit.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
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
MEMORYLESS TRAVEL
You have to get there to remember.
On the way there you will forget
Where you are going to
And why.
– 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
OPENING UP
My heart was broken
Over and over and over again by life
Until I was sure
That life really loves me
Or else it wouldn’t keep on opening me.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 