Dawn

MUSICIAN’S MORNING

~ Che ~ 1 Comment

EARLY IN the morning Anosike practised the minor chords on his box guitar, his best friend, whom he called Freedom. His soul was full and empty. He gripped the strings with his heart and gradually played, first arpeggio-style, then a-strumming, slowly changing from one chord to the other, one key to the higher.

Each time he caused the strings to vibrate, each time there arose sound from the instrument, a breath of calm seemed to sink into his soul. He did not want to stop.

By the time it began to grow bright outside, he had gone through only a third of the exercise. With a sigh he dropped Freedom lightly on his sparse, rough bed and arose.

For a few moments he remained motionless on his feet. His chest rose and fell, lightly. A look of gentle, dreamy reflection was trapped upon his face, a hard, rocky face with full lips and a strong, pugnacious forehead. He had an angular skull, radiated an intense and awkward, almost overpowering crude handsomeness. His observant grey-black eyes were turned inwards, his profile was angled towards the window.

It dawned on him again, like it did every once in a while, that destiny is like a skin. It wrapped itself around you even ere you arrived. It encapsules, encloses, protects and undermines you. Captures you. Teleguides you. It limits you. It links you to your world. It is hard to shed and hard to change. It lasts a lifetime.

Once again a wry smile was his reaction to this ever-recurring moment of recognition. A wry and sad smile. Yet it was a smile of amusement. No wonder snakes shed their skin. His humour was sometimes dark, sometimes light. He suddenly remembered that he had written something into his diary sometime in the middle of the night, something about train tracks, cocoon and the birth of butterfly. He remembered the feeling of the struggling butterfly. He reached across his bed, lifted his diary, opened it and read it again. Everything came back, the nocturnal stab of clarity that subsequent sleep had temporarily blotted out. It was the same recognition that had just come back again in the skin analogy. Now he felt calmer.
He emerged, composed, out of his reflection and went into the bathroom. A normal prelude to another abnormal day.

This was how it always started – with music, unfinished, and a startling recognition that would fill him all day long. This was the cycle of his life.

An awakening musician.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

AWAKENING AFTER A DREAM

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

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

BE YOU

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

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.

DAWN

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

I feel dawn
Like a song
I hear
Not with an outer ear

Like a light
Long before rosy twilight

Like an intuition
A budding perception
A forgetting
And a remembering

Like new birth
Upon the earth.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

NOSTALGIA’S DONE

~ Che ~ Leave a comment

Just now I saw a morning star, luminous in the sky high up above me. And then suddenly I see it no more. Blue-grey clouds are journeying past in silent, ominous solemnity. Morning has dawned. The birds, they are a-singing. Early people are writing their feet into the road… and I am sitting outside, writing poetry and pretending it is prose.

Perhaps by the time I am through, and raise my head anew, the clouds would have gone completely by, and my star will be visible to me again. But if not, yet still I carry within me the picture of my morning star, as luminous in my heart as it was luminous in the sky.

I suppose this is what they call Nostalgia.

Now, see: the sun is rising, and the light is come again. Star, sun and light. And there is spirit inside of me – spirit and love.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

ONLY US

~ Che ~ 12 Comments

It is not a joke;
But everyone is laughing
As though it were…

Early in the morning
I can hear voices whispering
Before dawn…
But when I peered out through the window
I saw nothing
Yet heard something
Which sounded like whispering voices
Talking to me
Telling me what to write

And I write without complaint
Even though the pain is sometimes astronomical –
Yet I write.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

JANUARY WILL BE DAWN

~ Che ~ 6 Comments

image

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

GOLD AND DAWN, SONGS, LONELINESS AND STRENGTHS

~ Che ~ 6 Comments

image
Gold glitters, but if all that glitters were gold, the world would be a place of great glitter and much emptiness.

Dawn ever arrives. No matter how dark the night, it will melt away when dawn awakens the travelling sun, and there will be laughter when you hear the voices of children playing in the morning…

Songs are a thing that are born mysteriously, and every moment everywhere hath its own songs too and there is no end to songs and games – and this has often mystified me.

And loneliness is a guest that comes and goes as he pleases, and once you get used to him, he becomes easy to live with and, together, both of you achieve many things which on your own you could not achieve, even if the whole world were to aid you.

There are some masterpieces which only lonely artists can create. There are some wars which only an army of lonely soldiers can win. There is a certain love which only two lonely hearts can share with one another. And loneliness seeks itself in you – but when loneliness goes away from you again, do not follow.

I am not strong. But when I unite with golden dawn and lonely songs, they make me the canvas on which they paint their dreams, and I am strong again. And free.

Gold and dawn, songs, loneliness and strengths.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

COURAGE AWAKENING

~ Che ~ 2 Comments

Shades of morning
Mantles of night ascending
Ghosts, like fears of the past,
Lay down softly to sleep at last.

Fear. Will whisper.
A thousand reasons to be a coward.
Until your inner man comes calling
The ground is so close
How come you’re still falling?

Beauty, soft kiss of dawn
Quietens you for a moment of tenderness
Before you shed your final skin
Of fear and pain
And stand up, never to crawl again.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.

DAWN BEFORE DAWN

~ Che ~ 5 Comments

The light that comes
Comes from within –
Sun, moon and stars
Are stars in your own inner film
Morning comes with distant murmurings
Trains and cars and birdsongs gurgling
Silence broken by the rain
And swallowed up in silence again.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.