See there, a stream
It flows only at night
How can this be?
Who melted my frozen pride?
Who taught me how to cry
When the night is singing?
The book of my life
The pages start revealing
Every petal of blossoming pain
The seed was mine, I broke the ground
And sealed it over with a pound of pride
Not a drop of remorse
Or so I thought.
Yet see, there, a stream
It flows at night in my loneliness
Pride thaws and falls like rains of regret.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You had to go to hell
To get the truth
After your ejected it
In heaven.
Don’t you know?
That’s the way it works
My friend
Hope you get it now.
Hell is Heaven’s secret school.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Your love was most present
In my life’s soup
When you were quietly absent
Your sea is a strong wall
Too deep, too intense, too wide
I don’t want it all
A pinch of you
On my flaming restless tongue
My dear, will do
You salivate my secret cult
With your infrequent invisible visits
Like salt.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
There is one frozen lake
That thaws not in the spring
It is winter of wordless ache
In my awakening
In my beginning
After I awoke
I greeted the earth and forgot
The language Creation spoke
Before the big bang
And ding dong merrily on high
Once upon a time
After a bell rang
Before the big bang
A song my spirit sang
Song of flame
In tongue of flame.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
There is no other reward than finding yourself
The reward is finding yourself
And experiencing the joy of being yourself
It might seem like a small reward to you now
But when you’ve tasted everything else
Then you’ll understand that this is the greatest reward
Anything that emerges from deep within me
Is native to me
My hometown is a state of being
My state of being.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
She saw a hunter resting in the forest
His manly shoulders
Caused the trees to heave
In expectation –
She ruffled the leaves of his hair
Placed her hand on her heart
As she read his rising thoughts
He had been waiting for her.
Tremble not, lovely maiden,
Stretch out your hands and pluck
My golden fruit
For it hath not ripened in vain
This forest whispers
Told me you were
Coming…
The hunter hath found his mark.
The queen of hearts
Has met her match.
Black grass will quiver tonight
But the forest will keep our secret, my dear.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
I forgot
I know not what
Because I forgot
And so I wander
And I wonder
Trying to remember.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
He loved her like the
Sun was about to fall down
Like lightning and thunder
Would be their eternal crown
And then when he’d had his fill he walked away
Now there she goes talking to herself
Each evening…
It hurts his soul
To see her cry
Yet he must go
He can’t explain why
The light and the darkness dwell inside his heart
So there she goes talking to herself
Each evening…
Trying to understand the demons in his heart
Trying hard to grasp what happened and then she starts
To blame herself for what she can’t explain
There she goes softly talking to herself
Each evening…
Each evening
Deep inside
Each evening
He’s suffering too
Too…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I met a kiss
As I walked through the woods
It came out from behind a tree
Out of the cold
And met my lips
When I was not looking
It sent a shock of sorrow
Through my memories of tomorrow
And when I opened my eyes again
It was gone.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Do you remember how we met?
It was by chance, wasn’t it?
That is, if we were to begin now
To believe in chance…
The chance that came our way –
We took it…
Just one look at it
And we took it –
I remember many beginnings
I remember the start of
Many love stories
But our beginning was indeed special
Because it was simply so natural
And so unaffected
Just like all the poems it has given birth to.
That was our beginning
And that shall be our story
The natural and the unaffected
Missing you breaks my heart
Even already on the first day
Without us together
Nothing o nothing will ever be the same Again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 