A day
Is a long way to travel
A truth
Is a deep lie to unravel
A kiss
Is a message of sorts
Friendship is a breaching
Of the law of torts
Intimacy is most intense
When you and your enemy
Break down each others’ defence.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
My friends are the improbable people
The ones you wouldn’t expect
Who never visit or party with me
Yet always show me respect
Who hide in the faceless crowd
And put in a good word for me
Who demand of me not company
But that I walk the path before me
Who even when we quarrel
Still never will betray me
Who tell me my failings to my face
But keep my secrets safely
Because I do the same for them
It is the way of friendship
The friends you rarely see me with
Are the ones you shouldn’t mess with.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I feel dawn
Like a song
I hear
Not with an outer ear
Like a light
Long before rosy twilight
Like an intuition
A budding perception
A forgetting
And a remembering
Like new birth
Upon the earth.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Wait, morning wind
Wait for my awakening
For I bring a sun
Today shall be another day
Of the same old depressing news
Of hatred, xenophobia, corruption and wars
If I didn’t have this sunlight
Rising daily in my soul
I would think the world were ending
Now my sun is risen
Now rise too, my morning wind
For the old world is ending.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Only a few days after
And already, that magical laughter
Like a wall-painting, hanging in time
Over there, at the back of my mind…
I turn around with thoughtful eyes:
Time stands still; ’tis the spirit that flies.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Money markets
The feet are far from the heart
Don’t get me started
I’ll never stop abusing you
I just can’t get enough of you
Why am I crying, you say?
I’m crying because my heart is cold
I’m crying because I feel no pain
I’m crying because I’m dying
And I don’t care.
I just like having it, owning it
Taking it, but I’m crying.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
She named me River
Because I whet her lowlands
In the hour of her drought
– I saw a palm tree
Hotly pursued by a multitude
Waving palms
But I did not understand
The power from which they sprung
Forth – must I understand?
Which sane river stops to understand itself?
Waters may rise to clouds to fall back as rain
But what woman rises from her heart to her head
To peer back down into her heart from her head
To understand herself
Without losing the misty way back to the dawn?
For she is mysterious yes it is complicated
As simple as a riddle
The flowing is the being, picture-perfect
It is frozen
Faster! Faster! Faster!
Breathlessly I never tire
The day she catches me
Is the day
She will lose her desire for me. For
She calls me River.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
I feel you close
All those of you
Who love the rose
Within you too,
When you’re near
All is fair
As virtue
When you’re gone
Or I the bridge
Have again undone,
Built a ridge,
I forget you,
Call you untrue
And intrigue…
But deep within
My human heart,
Beneath the skin,
Another part
Still remembers
In the fire’s embers
Our start.
There’s more in nature
Than what we see
Behind your second nature
Search quietly
There’ll you’ll find
Behind your mind
Your first nature…
The one that feels
The beings unseen
The one that heals
In the worlds between
Every night
Weeps for the Light
Unseen.
I feel you close
All those of you
Who love the rose
Within you too –
I know you’re near
I almost hear
And feel you…
A bond of love
Unbreakable
Linked to the Dove
A sacred table –
All those who know
Don’t let it show…
The world calls it a Fable.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
You never let the sun rise
Without it too making a compromise
Truths are protected by subtle lies
Give a little, grieve a little
Always grease a lot, take it all
In the spirit of we-sacrifice
Taboo and sacrilege you court
Hiding from safe place to safe place
Waving to your constituent electorate
But wait!, it’s a game, right?
Well played. You won again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
The tension is mounting
The spring is wound
The wind is waiting
The tornado is forming, is coming
Is come.
Pain is the voice
Of the garden in you
Inviting you to come into it
There to discover the newest treasure
It has prepared for you
Upon its peaks.
How far can you go?
How long can you walk a path?
How come?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 