A slice of moon for breakfast
A dotted star and tea
A blue-grey sky that will not last
For soon the sun will be
The slice of moon is smiling
And as it smiles it fades
The words are dilly-dallying
And my pen hesitates
By what premise did I now
Presume myself a man
And yet I promise, nay I vow
To serve the Son of Man
The slice of moon has disappeared
Did I just say a prayer?
I long to touch lives, that be shared
The music in my ear.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You don’t know
How it feels
To feel abandoned
Disoriented, homeless
Unprotected and lost
Do you?
It’s the worst thing
That can happen to
A child, a youth in
The making, a heart
In the breaking, an
Adult early forsaken.
It follows you
All your life
Like a boat sailing
And sailing and sailing
Looking, for land
To go ashore, never-finding
Sometimes I see
A pair of eyes
And I know that
You too were abandoned
And have never found
Your way back home again
The world is full of
Loneliness and stories
Half-written…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
If music is the universal language
Then who will teach
Me how to interpret
For example, say,
The language of the stars
The language of water
The body-language of true lovers
The language unspoken
And the language unheard…?
If music be the universal language
How come no-one hears
The songs of heaven
That are sung in celestial gardens
And descend into the earth every new day?
Or, if we hear
How come we do not understand?
It is very strange
This strange communication gap
Because everywhere I turn
Every sound is music
And every language is a song
More or less forgotten
More or less alive.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije..
She loves pain
To feel it I mean
Like earth loves rain
To feel it she says
Hurt me before you love me
Hurt me if you love me
Pain is my mantle
Break it open to reach me
Light my candle
Read my signals I’m screaming
Half her lovers think she’s joking
Until she ups and walks away
The other half keep her running
Round and round in circles
Seeking silence.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I do not know
What music is…
But I do know that
But for my love for music
I would be dead.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Writing for the Readership
Instead of for yourself
Following the Leadership
Ignoring yourself
Where will it lead you to?
When you get there
Vice in the Guise of Virtue
And Loneliness austere
And Amnesia won’t still your Longing
Still searching for a Sense of Belonging.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Kingdom of oil and salt
Swishing tales swipe the sand
Behind vanishing storytellers, nay, dreampreachers
With high-sounding verses
They promised us a great future
Where are they now?
Where are they now, to see us
Reaping locusts and riffling through
Sheaves of worrisome mirrors
For, how closely the future mirrors the past!
Eyeballs hypnosis of rearview mirrors
Nobody driving the car forward.
Too much salt!
Do you hear my tongue burning
A song of sadness into your ears?
Too much heat! To look back
While walking forward is folly
New generation, is folly.
New generation. This name mocks you
Like it mocked before your time
Every generation that came and left.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Bear with grace
Life’s every face
Truth is a buffet
Conscience is selective
I guess everyone is right
According to taste
You’ll always be someone else
To someone else
But the sum of your contradictions
Contradicts each one of them –
But bear with grace
Every face, life’s every phase.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Silent things, unnamed
Unnameable, nameless
Lie between us like yesterday
Why does yesterday
Continue always to exist?
Why doesn’t it just go away forever?
Why must we understand yesterday
In order to understand today?
Why do we even bother to seek for
Understanding amongst our human selves?
Mystery
The very mystery itself, no answer
Round and round. I can’t bear it
When we fight, dear.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
From my collection of Poems: WRITING IS THE HAPPINESS OF SORROW.
Let the bloody bougainvillea
Weight not down your heavy-laden shoulders
With the multitude of its crimson little hearts
For beauty can be a burden
When ugliness is your desire
Your ardent craving – throbbing need.
Remember those nights
When you were the night and the night
Was the restless insomniac
And you threw the petals of the rose away
And yearned for the thorns instead
And the thorn was your rose.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 