There is a lightness of words
That, when it leans on you
Your heaviest resistance disintegrates
And you learn a new
Meaning of the word Gravity.
For the lighter wrestles the heavier
To the ground
The whisper beats the shout
To the sound
The rigid mind of intellect
Remains earth-bound
While the childlike heart of intuition
Freedom has found.
Like a flame dancing on water
Spirit is light as dove
And heavy as conscience.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Beautiful is the song of siring
In haunts of wanting
In gaunt bellies of starving need
My roots will ravish your burning greed
And then turn again, midnight
And accept the other side of the sun
Thrust out the other cheek
And if it hurts, let the pain make you weak
The weak will inherit the night
And the strong will be on their knees
Begging for more of yesterday
No to power, yes to play.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You’ll never be a better man
Than the boy you once were
So, when you lose your way
The answer you seek is not far:
Remember the dream you once had
Between child- and adulthood
When the boy you once were
Had just awakened from his dream
And the man you now are
Had not yet forgotten that dream.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Those trees
Changing leaves
Changing their minds
Turning times
Redressing time
But there’s an hour when
Fear leaves
Turned red
Fall yellow, weak, finished, all said and dead.
Then you change your mind too
After the thoughts are fallen
Your fearlessness stands naked hard in the bolding cold
Do you fear your own freedom, your own self-dependence?
Are you afraid of your own courage?
November strips the brave of their cowardice
And the cowardly of their bravery.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Wait for the knocking of the carpenter
For it won’t be long
Lovingly building that cradle, soft of hay
It will be rocked by a virgin’s song
But a prouder man, a truer man
Will watch over the smile of a radiant star
– Then, lonely earth spirit, light up your heart
For Christmas is no longer far.
And if you think deeper, you will realise
He did not come to die, but to open up our eyes
To Life, to love, to a new reason to strive.
Breathe again, wilted human flowers – and rise…
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There used to be a village quiet
One of many of the same childlike face
Faces of native fisherfolk
Of contentment in nature’s ancient cradle
A village on the river
Somewhere in the labyrinth of the Niger Delta
The songs they sang on their swaying boats
Put to sleep the fish in their nets’ embrace
Sweet was the voice of the water
Clear, her heart, clear, her mind
But, treacherous, the land bore a secret treasure
Deep within her precious heart
And they came, they came, thirsty
For the dark oily secret in her laps
And they drill, they drill, deeply, and spill
And until today they’re coming still
The village, it is no more
The river’s song is choked slowly to death
Crude and dark and slimy and viscous
The oil has smeared the water and defiled the land
But, unquenched, the flames of caustic lust
Still they burn, still they yearn
The bright acid fires that char our skin
Burn our throats too and poison deep our thoughts
Our colourful birds are burned into memory
Our fish, our beasts will be future-fossilized
There was a tree, it was the last of its kind
May nature preserve our footprints still formed
And the villagers now are refugees at home
Seeking other shores and other huts
Seeking rivers where they can again sing their songs
As they outcast their ancestral nets
And in their hearts they never forget
That once upon a not-so-distant time
They had a land, they had a river, that hid
A precious dark secret beneath its soft breast.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Arctic thirty
Arctic melting
The smell of oil
Well conflicting
A powerless crew
Against a powerful few
The wealth of the earth
Is in the human heart.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Take in little sips
My waterfall
My aching brown lips
Gently call
Did softly my love
Water your flower?
Then a Little is enough
… A gentle shower
So, now, slow it down
Time stands still
And the heights we crown
Will be gentler still
Come, cup your Hands –
The night rain
Fills and understands
Our gentlest pain
And when I flow away
Say to our offsprings
In your wild blood play
Love’s gentle wings.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Unusual is the hand
That can count backwards
The name of the original land
That birthed its ancestors forwards
Every many generations the slate is wiped clean
You think you are there where you always have been
But most every native is a fruit of some old migrant tree
That forgot its deep roots in some distant ancient century
And some disappeared Country.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
We are so strongly influenced
By the form of what we see
That we lose sight of a sense
Of what its true content could be
Who would ever guess
That in a cocoon sleeps a butterfly
Or that the greatest devil of all
Looks like an angel in the sky?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 