WHAT WE REALLY SEE

Nobody ever walks down the street,
Everybody always walks through their own world.
Nobody ever looks at the world,
Everybody always looks at an image in their mind.

Nobody lives outside
Everybody lives inside
Inside their own head, inside their own heart
Until you see what a person is looking at
In the core of their being
You’ll never know what they are seeing
When they are looking at you.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

Poems from the inner river

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

WHY?

I cannot handle lies
like hot mounds of yam on a plate
smoking squinted eyes
thoughtfully tonguing open the gate
of questioning Whys
where Truth comes never or too late
to hear my heart’s cries.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

Poems from the inner river

EAGLE AT HEART

Landing in Barcelona

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

LIFE RECIPROCATES

If you create beauty,
Beauty will create you.

If you give birth to a child,
The child will give birth to you.

If you make a mistake,
The mistake will make you.

If you reach for the Highest,
The Highest will reach for you.

And if you look for the Grail,
The Grail will find you.

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)