You have to get there to remember.
On the way there you will forget
Where you are going to
And why.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
amnesia
REMEMBER
Sunday
My body has returned from Worship
My spirit not yet
The sounds around me are like a dream
Far away
Where sunrise is sunset
The home around me is
A faint reflection of another Home
I often forget.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
VOICES NEAR
Has Music jarred you through and through before? I don’t mean the base, coarse Music of now. I’m talking about the High Trumpets of the Immortal Realms. Have you heard them before?
Have you heard your heart beat before? I mean not the muscle. I’m talking about the leap of the flame in you when Heaven gave you a Name. What’s your Name?
Show me your friends, man, and I’ll tell you who you are – your real friends. Show me your Palms and I’ll teach you your destiny.
Have you ever before been blinded by dazzling Sunlight? Not the sun in the sky, but the Sun Above All Skies. – Show me your face, sister, and I’ll read a Million things thereupon.
Yesterday gave birth to today. Today yields tomorrow, the known unknown.
When I am alone, alone, sometimes, I remember my brother faraway… Not he who died recently, but he who has never once died. The Immortal Spirit whom I knew – before we were born as brothers on earth – in a blue Kingdom far so far away. A Kingdom whose Name, if I ever knew it, I have long forgotten.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
AMNESIA
It’s so easy to forget
Who you are
The longer you live like them
With them
Amongst them
Sleep is depth
Is debt
Is death
The greatest treasure on earth
Is memory
Spirit, it’s so easy to forget
Who you are
On Earth.
Everything seems normal
To sleepwalker.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
DIMLY
I touch my intuition
Every morning
And at night I remember it
Like a friend from long ago
Far away
On the riverbanks of dawn
I forget what I saw in the soft bright sunlight
Of nightly dreams
Sometimes during the day
It will beat
Like a weak heart
I barely hear, barely feel
Quietly inside
Between conversations of How are you?
How are the revenue figures doing?
Very poorly. Stop. And look into the water
And feel your life
Trying to flow back to you, in little ripples
Of intuitively perceived memory
Of the blue island.
Don’t shake your head
And tell me you don’t understand
I know you simply don’t remember…
But I remember you; dimly
Like a friend from long long ago
Far far away
On a blue island….
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
AWAKENING AFTER A DREAM
Awakening out of a deeper reality
A dream of music, philosophy, poetry
Still ringing on in me, but fading fast
Each new second retaining less than the last
The dream fades away like an improbable past –
A populous sea into which a porous net is cast
The intellect tries to find again words, details
From each finishing dream but maddeningly fails –
Words which I just wrote down, somewhere, somehow
In a dream I was having sometime just right now
Melodies I was humming, natural realities I saw
I feel them still in me, but see them no more
For the heavy cloak and mind of a small and rigid earth
Have imprisoned again my consciousness, like once at birth –
For as swiftly and surely as we once forgot the baby tongue
As we grew from baby to child, yet remained young
So do words, connections given to us in our dreams
Oft disappear during Awakening, magically it seems
The harder the Intellect tries to affect their remembering
The faster it hastens their forgetting –
Even while we are still lying, freshly awake, in the morning bed
Watching one thing fading, another taking over, inside our head
As one sun rises, another sun is setting gently –
The glass is unclear, twilight illuminates faintly
Dawn and Dusk together were breaking…
Wish I could remember who I really am, upon awakening.
Not acceptable, this unending sleep
Of an eternal consciousness in the Deep.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
HOPE
I saw hope, lost
On the hills, amnesiac
And she was
Looking for hope.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 