Have you ever listened to
The night talking to itself
While you lay there beside one another
And not a word occurred to you?
You see the end approaching
Like a boat coming to the shore
To take you away
Away from a laughter called love
And as your worlds drift apart
In the space of one short night
Strange, but no words occur to you
To adequately say goodbye.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Drooping, a wing, the corners of a mouth
A face, a heart, a pair of wings again
Drooping –
A second life –
All alone. What does this mean? It means
Nobody has ever grasped.
You see the flower at dusk
Which you saw at dawn
The flower recognises you and opens up to you
But you pass it by
You have gone blind
You have walled yourself in
In that moment in which
You lost your
Insight…
By and by, you learn again
To see
The same flower of always
Waiting beside your heart,
I leap.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The last was the first
It burst out of the blue dark skies
And brought light! It shone
And won our hearts, our better parts, our bitter parts
Yet it was the last.
The first was like the last
It melted away softly into wintry blues
And, oozing, seemed to reunite with windows closed
And nothing more was to be said, all appeared dead.
Yet it was the first.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
An azure mind paints lightly the horizon
Its thoughts a cloudy mess
That grow old too quickly and fall to
Your knees from these incontinent skies
Like a stranger walking through the
Valley of the Shadow of Death
I trek noiselessly through my thoughts
And leave the plane-flying to the pilots
The reason why these things are writing me
Is because I have ripped out old pages
And need to be re-marked, re-bled, re-lined
For I have lost my old mind.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
My heart won’t stop beating
The urge to remember
A certain curve of the road
That leads out of Grasmere
Towards Rydal
Where the motor road and the lake
Part the wanderer’s feet
Step upon an earthen path that shall
Unhurrying though the trees
Curve the curving lake into the little bridge
At the lake’s dove tail, brought us
To the shore at the foot of a hill
Where, turning, we face
Far across Grasmere lake
The enchanting rough and tumble
Chained Cumbrian hills…
Like a worried teacher
Anxious that the fleeting pupil
Fully absorb what he, left alone
Must one day on his own remember
Drawn out of the depths of a retentive heart
That wasn’t deaf and blind
When it wandered this path, admiring nature
With such peculiar urgency does this curve in the road
Where the road and the lake separate
And the woods begin, stand
Before my inner eye
Like an evening star long after the Sun has died…
A trigger, for when I focus
On that turn of the road, I see again
The rest of the walk
That followed it
Continues to follow me.
A familiar friend
A giving, undemanding lover
A memory already more precious
Than Silver and Gold.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
(Cumbrian Lines: Poems inspired by the Lake District)
I hold you tenderly
Like a precious thought
I sparingly share
Only with strangers
For they know not its worth
Will not rob me of it or its meaning or
Crush it to death like a writer
Crushes an idea in his mind –
Might be a butterfly
Might be a petal
Might be a story that would have changed minds –
Gone, unwritten, unspoken, unshared.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 