Show people who you are So that those who want to go will go And those who want to stay will stay And those who want to come will come And those who want to keep away will keep away. And when they show you who they are You will be hurt by some who go And be pleasantly surprised by some who stay, You will be amazed by some who come And you will not even notice those who keep away. Show people who you are And they will show you who they are. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
authenticity
ONCE WE WERE LIGHT
Once we were light
But the world weighed us down
Drowned out our cry of resistance
And put a bandage over our eyes
A desperate cry for help
Before we fell silent
And started to look silently at our children
The way once our parents looked at us
Now we know what they were thinking:
Retain your magic! Retain your lightness!
Even as they said to us worriedly:
You have to learn to fit into the system –
Knowing it was not the way
But knowing no other way
Or knowing it but not having the heart
To push us off the cliff –
Because not everybody grows wings
When falling through the gap.
The generation gap.
Now we watch our children worriedly
Wanting them to become like us
And wanting them to stay themselves too.
Once we were light
But the world weighed us down.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
HEY, I’M HUMAN!
They say I make enemies on all sides. Sycophancy and hypocrisy seem to be the price of friendship and group play in a civilized, polished world gone corporate. Living analog authenticity has been replaced by plastic digital superficial smoothness. Personality is dead; long live the System.
But I refuse to be the servant of a System that serves only itself and not the human in me. Being myself is not suicide; surrendering to the System is the real suicide. Being myself is birth, is life.
Don’t kill yourself. Resist. Be it education, be it politics, be it diplomacy, be it the corporate world, be it religion, be it organised Sport – they all demand one thing: the compromise and capitulation of the true human being. The human Spirit. Thwart their plan. Resist!
In every aspect of life, deep in the fabric of our group existence, we have to change the System. And it starts when the individual human being comes back to life. Until you know yourself, you won’t know your real friends. They may be many more than you think, but you don’t know and they don’t know – because you are all afraid to be the first to drop the mask and say:
“Hey, I’m human! Are you?”
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
BE YOU
All I can do
Is just sing my songs
Between currents of dawn
I am a tree
The Iroko said to the ground
I cannot be grass too
Nor wind that comes and goes
And sings with birds and scents
And distant tales.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
GIFT
Give me you.
Before you begin to wonder
What you are, remember
That each star and each season
Is nature’s gift for a reason
And you, dear spirit, your blossoming heart
Is spirit’s gift to the gift of art
It is the art of being you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
BRAVE ONE
Your secrets
Give them power over you
When you lose your fear of your secrets
They lose their power over you
No-one is feared more
Than one who says yes I did it, so what?
You can break a warrior’s shell
But you cannot make the warrior fear you as well.
Breathe out, brave one, and live some more
Your weaknesses and your strengths are all you’ve got.
– 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
SECRET
He was a messenger from far away
This thought that I secretly caught
And wonderful tidings he brought my way
Of all the secret things I still ought
Nay, must, do, must do
To you, my dear, to you.
But this he whispered first of all
That I must meet another stranger first
And secretly yield to his inner call
He lives in me, my root intuition’s thirst
For my secret powers become free
Only after I first become me.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
INNER SHARING
Every friend
Takes a piece of you
But not all
Will give it back
From friendship to friendship
You lose more of you
And have to reinvent yourself
In the end
This is when
Your friends will tell you
That you have changed
And they don’t know you anymore
Only those
Who gave back what they took
Will understand you now
Because they were the soil
That yielded you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
WRITE AND WRONG
Writing for the Readership
Instead of for yourself
Following the Leadership
Ignoring yourself
Where will it lead you to?
When you get there
Vice in the Guise of Virtue
And Loneliness austere
And Amnesia won’t still your Longing
Still searching for a Sense of Belonging.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 