FOR WE ARE ONE

Your face I know
But not your name
Your faces I know
But I know not your Names…

We meet everyday, everywhere
Our vibrations, our radiations never were parted
From one another –
I know you, I love you, you are my Home
On earth.

Hold me, Song of Eternity, like we were
One.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

MY FLAMING HEART

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How many women
Can quench my thirst?

How many loves
Can calm my racing heart?

How many homes
Can contain all my feelings?

My flaming heart
Will have its piece

My flaming heart
Will have its peace

O flaming heart
Be still, be still…

The wind is blowing
The river is flowing –
Peace, be still.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
amazon cover copy river 2015

JANUARY WILL BE DAWN

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The Christmas holiday season
is like a dream

In January you wake up and
try to retain

as much of the dream as possible
within your heart.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

SPIRIT SLEEP

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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.

YAWN DAWNING

We are not a new Generation
We are just a new generation-gap

The end is still a promise away
The new beginning is not ours to anchor
We are the same as our fathers of yesterday
We are the repetition of our every ancestor –

We are not a new Generation
We are just a new generation-gap.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
amazon cover copy river 2015

MUSIC TEACHER

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He points his guitar
Not like a musician to the side
Not like a gunman
Aiming his battle at you
But like a prayer up into the sky

And when he sings
Our eyes die on him
Our hearts lift up with hope
And follow his guitar
Pointing up into the sky deep within us.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

FRIEND IN DEED

In the days of night
The unroaded paths
Only one only one
Was constant –

To her I pen this poem tonight

Only one only one
Was constant –

While I slept, while I woke
While I walked and while I wept
While I sought and fought and caught
And was alone

In my heart was the sound of music

Only one only one
Was constant –

To music I pen this poem tonight.

-Che Chidi Chukwumerije

 

KNIGHT’S TRAP

image blitzmaerker/pixabay

I fell into the knight’s trap
Of trying to protect my mother
From my father

Nay
Of seeing things from her point of view
And refusing to look at them from his
Forgetting that he and I are the same –

A feathered castle is the strongest prison –

When I became a man too
Then I knew
That wittingly or unwittingly
She had simply divided father and son
For decades of lifetimes
And
Brought me together with my father
In my heart
Today.

A knight should free the maiden –
But then
Thereafter
He should remember
To free himself too
From the maiden
And ride back home
To his own castle.

Never stay.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

 

image: blitzmaerker/pixabay

OUTSIDE THE HOLD

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If the door from the front opens not
Look back
I am behind you.

After the first poem I broke loose
The walls disappeared
The green branches outside the window
Became the staircase
Upon which I stepped out of
The broken chains
I look at you with eyes which
However hard you try
You cannot read…

You are looking for a Lie
In my eyes
Whereas you ought be looking
In there
For the Truth

I will not return.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

 

image: fanny4902/pixabay

AS YOU AGE

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From one to the next bondage
One to the next stage of life
Strife follows on strife
As you age.

If joy was a seed
I hope you planted it
If life requested a good deed
I hope you granted it –

’Cause that’s all you’ll have
When you cross the grave.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

 

image: wilhei/pixabay