Where she is is home,
Hope, I shall no longer roam
Any further, she’s my world,
My home, around me curled,
Unfurled, wanting me bad,
I, this never-ending fairy-lad.
Home, where she is is
Home, hope, land of bliss, is
Where I stay, I roam no more,
I return home and want no more.
– che chidi chukwumerije
I don’t know if you’ve heard
There is a land where girls were stolen
Kidnapped it’s called in sociopolitical speak
That land happens to be my country
Those girls another set of casualties
In a war of religion and education
Let’s just call it a war on humanity
The candles are going out
From one country to the next
Some swear the second world war is not yet over
Others boast the cold war is far from done
Meanwhile an old war has long begun
Some call this the third world war
The last one apparently Nostradamus encrypted
For sure it is a religious war on faith
Everyday it opens up a new field of battle
Now it has picked on my country too
And made her the new local theater of a global scourge
But how do you win a religious war?
By killing, or by forgiving?
By retaliating or by reconciling?
It is a philoshical puzzle
A paradox of semantics
In which real people die everyday.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The hidden feather
There and not there
Fluttering, silent, soft
Bearing a great thing aloft.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
It’s just life
No pause
Inescapable laws
No brakes
No breaks
No breaking out – you’re done in
Few gives, few takes
The dark is near
It is in there
It’s always there
It’s just life
You pay the price – that’s your role
There is a myth, a legend
A hurt-filled, painful, word
They call it love
There are no guarantees
But they say
It will set you free – nothing more
It won’t bring you wealth
It won’t bring you power
It’s just life
Keep it warm
Keep it safe
Keep it alive – love – it’ll keep you alive.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
To encompass a mighty tale
Within the letters of a little poem
Little sentence, little phrase
One little word
To start with the clue and end with the question
To give the world in every act
To live a life never lived before
By you.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
The hot burning
The lust turning you on
The engine churning
The drive yearning to come
Intuition discerning
Twixt the journeying weeper
And the earning
Of the learning reaper.
– che chidi chukwumerije
Pain kills
Pain heals
Pain thrills
It steals
And wills
And feels
And it chills
When pain rhymes
It rhymes with the times
And when it doesn’t
It doesn’t matter
Pain only rhymes when it matters.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
I’m alive
When I was dead
The words flowed
Knocking knocking in the coffin
Now I’m alive
They hold their peace
I don’t write my fantasies anymore
I live them now
When I start writing again
Pity me. Mourn, mourn for me.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE
Duet with Helenvalentina
On the morning I ached
For the memory of the night
When my soul within was stricken
Before ineffable light
And the face of one remembered
Was unutterably bright
In the mounts of memory
Hidden, this valley
Where you sang a sun
To birth, rise in glory
Spirit of immortality
Half-seen-and-unseen you pull me
From these ancient hallways
I witnessed the reign
Of a long yearned for god child
Returned to this plain
And I fell, not from weakness
But from fervour regained
And yet in truth we both know
‘Tis all half-truth and metaphor
Cloaking what it claims to unveil
Our thirst for less and more
Less of hide-and-seek
And more of flame and fervour
Ah and here the sweet pain
That rends through my soul
The numinous so fleeting
To encompass us whole
And yet then it’s just whispers
Where shadows unfold.
———————————————-
by Helenvalentina and Che Chidi Chukwumerije
———————————————-
She loved him
Not because he was
Something out of the ordinary
But because he was so ordinary
He touched and massaged the ordinary
In her.
She loved him
Not because he amongst all human beings
Stood the most out
But because he was concealed in the crowd
Offered her the quiet refuge
In which she could peacefully shelter herself
In him.
She had a deep need to love somebody
That was why she loved him
For no other reason
Than that he could be quietly loved
In a world of their own, far
From the looking crowd
He was the answer to her quiet prayer.
She let out a long, deep sigh
It sounded like a moan
A deep-throated groan
Accompanied by breathlessly running tears
And the unquantifiably precious feeling
Of satisfaction
Relief
And held him in her arms
Held him tightly, loosely, in her heart
Dear him.
He swallowed, moved to the core
And loved her back
What he had always yearned for
All his life.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 