The heart needs a long time To understand that someone is gone. Decades after the death bells chime, The heart still waits for the loved one To come back home. The heart needs a long time Because hearts are built for eternity. Loving is more violent than crime, You’ll be sentenced to immortality As you wander and roam Trying to come back home. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
Of Family Affairs
SAME DIFFERENCE
A marriage should not be based on emotions and karmic threads, but on spiritual homogeneity. If you are a truth seeker, then your partner must be a truth seeker too. If you have a certain conviction or recognition about how life really is and should be lived, then your partner must share a similar recognition or consciousness, independently and self-motivatedly, otherwise you will not be able to go down the same path together; you will not travel together in the same direction. If you are not anchored in the same spiritual orientation, then when critical challenges come upon you you will make fundamentally different decisions, guided each by a different assumption or conviction – because you have fundamentally different understandings of what life is, how life is, and what really matters in life. You have to be travelling in the same direction first, for the same reason, in order to be able to complement one another in your union and enrich one another with your differences.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains
REAFFIRMING DIGNITY
When a woman leaves a man who loves her to follow a man of money, it is the most crushing pain a man can feel. But if he does not let it kill him, it will only liberate him in the end. Every once in a while you have a chance to look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself “I am somebody”. Something will push you there. Something that seems aimed at robbing you of your dignity, your pride, your self-respect. Something that will try to tie your actual value as a human being to some material status or achievement or level of acceptance by someone or some people. Something that will make you feel small. And nothing does this deeper than love that chooses money over you. Then you have to stand in front of the mirror and look into the soul of that man staring back at you and recognise his true value. Remind yourself of the principles at the core of your foundations as a Human Being. Remind yourself of what connects you to God and to true life. And teach yourself again that your value is more than your monetary wealth or material standing. And don’t allow anyone to tell you otherwise – not any man and not any woman. Because, In Your Dignity, You Are Somebody.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains
LOVE AND PAIN
Why is there so much hurt in this world? Why is it hard for people to join hearts without causing each other pain? Why is pain an unavoidable component of love and of togetherness? Is the human spirit really incapable of honest, pure, harmonious, mature love?
The people that love you are the people you will hurt, and they are the people that will hurt you the deepest and the most. And yet you cannot stop loving and you cannot stop loving them. Nor they you.
Who has ever found happiness on earth without it being laced with anguish and spiked with periodic doses of lacerating pain? If you haven’t found this, then you’ve never felt love yet. Because you can never find the love without the pain.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains
TREASURE IT
When someone loves you Really loves you Treasure it above due It is worth much more than you know Lack of love is poverty too Lack of joy and companionship too - Treasure love above due It is worth much more than you know. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
EVERYONE CAN BE HAPPY
There is somebody that loves you genuinely; May you find that person - And may you also love that person genuinely. But if you don’t find or love that person, Still may you find happiness in life. Not everyone finds a husband or a wife, But everyone can be happy genuinely. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER
For whom shall I write now? For whom shall I fight now? Who shall shine the light now That illuminates my heart? Lovers don’t turn into friends, They turn into strangers. Life the gardener tends Both safeties and dangers. But when November ends, December births mangers And shines new light to my heart. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
VANISHING
Don’t come back after I’ve got used to your absence
Your absence has become your strongest presence
If you return too late you’ll only find yourself gone
Replaced by memory, you’ll be the invisible one.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river
BE WHO YOU ARE
It does not matter who your father is,
Or was. It only matters who you are;
Throw off the reputational burden of his
Life, whether a nobody, a crook or a star.
It does not matter who your mother is,
Was, or will be. You have your own destiny.
Be firm in rejecting her spirit’s liabilities,
Nor bask in her glory. Write your own story.
Never ever allow family to be your bondage.
If wealth is not health, detach and go higher.
The chains of name, blood, and heritage
Are human assumptions, not God’s desire.
God wants each unique creature to be true,
So experience and enrich the world as You.
Free your children too from the Obligation to
Follow, serve, help, complete or redeem you.
If your story happens to be your family’s too,
Then so be it, that’s who you genuinely are.
But if your story is totally different and new,
Don’t feel guilty; accept and be who you are.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river
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
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 