My pain plays with me
My pain stays with me
My pain prays with me
When I pray…
My pain visits me
My pain kisses me
My pain teaches me
How to pray…
I forget you, I forget me
I have to, because without you and without me
I know no pain, even when I pray.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Ibises of paradise
Crows of light
Echoes of Dove and Rose
Palm Trees and Christmas Day
From high up on a Tower
Bells ringing
Come to rest…
And the rest is Christmas Day
Side by side
We shoulder the walk up
The Mountainstar, unto the
Mountaintop
And peace.
For we are not walking alone
We are walking alone
With nature’s laws.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
A smile is made up of many wounds
A road is the sum of innumerable restless feet
Love is the pain that pleasures
And victory is defiance in the heart of defeat
But what is spirit?
Spirit is
The stranger that walks the earth
For whom death is birth
Sleepwalker swaying at deep’s edge
Unfulfilled, the promise, unremembered, the pledge.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There is a lightness of words
That, when it leans on you
Your heaviest resistance disintegrates
And you learn a new
Meaning of the word Gravity.
For the lighter wrestles the heavier
To the ground
The whisper beats the shout
To the sound
The rigid mind of intellect
Remains earth-bound
While the childlike heart of intuition
Freedom has found.
Like a flame dancing on water
Spirit is light as dove
And heavy as conscience.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Works that stay
And show the way
To travelling spirits
On the right road
Long after I myself have passed
This way.
Not works of vanity
Nor dance of insanity
But honesty to my spirit
Who drank whilst thirsty
And knows the source of eternal water
The Grail’s Fountain.
Some seek politics
Some seek academics
Some believe in race issues
Some ideology or religion
And many will seek only pleasure
And self.
But through history
An inner mystery
Occupies all human spirits
It doesn’t die or fade –
The urge to know the true meaning of
The chalice, the stone, the mystery, the fountain,
The beginning, the origin, the genesis, the portal, the Grail.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There is someone, higher up
Who births and breathes into the ethers
One new poem everyday
In one of the poems he gave away
He expressed the wish, the urge
That far far far away
On the distant earth another poet
Would also start to do the same
And his wish came true
It may sound strange to you
But sometimes you simply are
Another person’s replica
Just by being yourself.
Life extends its boundaries
By replicating its core.
No matter what you think, no matter
What you know, of one thing be sure
There is always something more.
And when you think you created something
The blueprint was created by another
Whose path you’ll never cross
But his work lives in you, and a thousand
Years from now, another will happen upon
This thought you are thinking now
And he will think it is his original idea
And will bring it to what he thinks is
Fruition, and yet is just another seed.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I just saw
The most beautiful woman I have ever seen
On earth…
I just heard
The most touching birdsong I have ever heard
On earth…
I just lived through
My most breath-taking dawn ever
Upon this earth…
I just said
The most beautiful thing I have ever said
On earth…
Yet my spirit only laughed
And whispered:
Even more beautiful could it yet be.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
We came suddenly upon the path
Of the Faraway-man
We heard suddenly the flute he hath
Been using to call his clan
Birds, beasts, fish and fairies, all
Followed the Faraway-man
And man alone doth Heaven now call
The lonely faraway man.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 