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
Poetry
SPIRIT SLEEP
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.
MUSIC TEACHER
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
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
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
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
CHRISTMAS COMING
The night raised its dark heavy head
And sniffed long at the wind
And then lit up with a thousand smiles
As though it had never ever sinned
Imagine that. The sinful night
And when I asked it to tell me why
It said in a gentle voice of hope
While pointing up into the eastern sky:
Once upon a time, it was
More than two thousand years ago
A radiant star appeared right there
And over a manger there glowed a halo
And thus did hope return to mankind.
And, o little poet, in a few days’ time
We celebrate again the birthday
Of the Love that inspires your deepest rhyme.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
image: Gellinger/Pixabay.
COMING BACK
You reap what you sow
And pay back what you owe –
Just a little rhyme to remember
When you harvest the crops in September.
Never burn the bridge you’re travelling on
For it alone will lead you back to where you begun –
Just a little thought to ponder on
Wanderer, before you wake up and wander on.
Givers never lack
Takers never give back
Because they forever lack –
The newest face has on old old back
The global highway was once a little dirt track.
We reap what we sow
And pay back what we owe –
Just a little rhyme to remember
Brother, when you await the new year in December.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
(Image courtesy Pexels/Pixabay)
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 