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.
Poetry
WRITE AND WRONG
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.
JUST DO SOMETHING NEW
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.
ALL OF IT
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.
SEALING UP
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.
UGLY BEAUTY
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.
YOUR ONE TRUE FRIEND IS YOU
A broken heart, how shall it mend?
Who shall this garden tend?
My heart, my heart… break not, nor bend
But remain into every end
My unwavering friend.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
PLEASE TEASE ME
Who will it be
After me?
Who will it be
Baby?
Who could make it
Like it was?
Who could take it
And leave no flaws?
Never forget me
Little tease
Never forget me
Please.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
LIFE’S QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Some questions are young
Saplings lost in a world of mystery
Too soon despairing and coming to the conclusion
That some questions have no answers
Some answers are old
You have to journey the whole length to grasp them
From the mountain-top of distant insight
They watch the questions growing in the valley
Child, when I tell you you won’t understand
’Tis not folly on my part, seeing that you don’t understand
I say it to you not so that you’ll believe, accept or understand
But so that when it’s your turn you will remember
Remember that I told you that the answers come late
So despair not, thinking you’ve lived in vain
Despair not, ’tis the nature of life
To answer tomorrow the questions it posed yesterday
Today is its gift to you
That you may wander and seek by yourself
And wonder, and marvel, and err, lose, learn, and grow
And fear, and fight, and love, laugh, and live, and find and become yourself.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
SECRETS AND MATURITY
The trauma of her upbringing
Shook her soul awake
Like a rough wind in a sudden spring
Rids bare branches of snow and brake
With a shock, with a shock, she thawed stood
A girl with the wisdom of womanhood.
What secrets does she hide inside
Behind her smile, behind her mask?
Her classmates many times have tried
But somehow just not dared to ask.
Whatever their sorrows, she holds their hands
And all can sense that she understands.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
