Mockery is one of the greatest weapons of the Darkness
In its fight against the Light
And it is one against which Light-seekers and Light-servants
Are powerless and defenceless the most
Because it strikes them at the core of their ego and vanity
The deepest weakness within all human beings.
Bear this in mind:
A helping thought for the earnest seeker.
It will strengthen you in your hour of vulnerability.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You’re walking on water
Don’t think it is land
The tide is about to turn
Your feet into sand
Signals sent out over the earth
Kill them before they grow
There is a protection Claws in our justice
For a darker tomorrow
Subliminal messages
Password more valid than passport
What is the colour of love?
Blindness is just in court
Mankind will destroy humanity
And claim to be its saviour
And cunning will mask hatred
And none shalt love thy neighbour.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
In Memory.
There is evil in the air
It chokes your breath in unexpected places
A playground, full of hard adult eyes
Watching, and avoiding, each other
While playing children loudly try
To shout the intruders merrily out –
One by one each parent
Picks up its child and hurries home
Away from this place
And no-one can say really why
The world became like this
Or when. It’s the future, and we’re there.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
I don’t know if you’ve heard
There is a land where girls were stolen
Kidnapped it’s called in sociopolitical speak
That land happens to be my country
Those girls another set of casualties
In a war of religion and education
Let’s just call it a war on humanity
The candles are going out
From one country to the next
Some swear the second world war is not yet over
Others boast the cold war is far from done
Meanwhile an old war has long begun
Some call this the third world war
The last one apparently Nostradamus encrypted
For sure it is a religious war on faith
Everyday it opens up a new field of battle
Now it has picked on my country too
And made her the new local theater of a global scourge
But how do you win a religious war?
By killing, or by forgiving?
By retaliating or by reconciling?
It is a philoshical puzzle
A paradox of semantics
In which real people die everyday.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
What fear is it that colonises us as we advance and infects us with the thirst for safety? Why, how does it conquer us? Why do we yield to the fear of the unknown? Were we always seeking the valley and never the mountain-peak? Was this always our secret goal? Or did we fall somewhere, and hide thereafter behind a smile and a serious frown or the line in-between, shutting our eyes carefully so that the world would not be bothered much by the sight of the decaying of our most cherished dream?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
They will pull you back
They are afraid of…
Anything that moves!
Long shackled pain and fear
Madden the mind
Time stands still
The tempted, fallen, becomes
The tempter
Learn to recognize them
The source of your pain
The source of your freedom
Movement!
The quiet is defeaning
It bursts your eardrums
Eery and foreboding
Who will make the first move?
Who will change sides?
What is really happening?
History, like a confused child
Keeps coming back home
Looking for its parents
History, like a boomerang
Circles and circles the raised hand
Waiting for peace and rest.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
THERE IS a man in the Nsukka Hills. If you drive past between 7 and 8 pm in the evening and look up with sharpened eyes, you might see his outline. Some say he is mad. Others say he is not. But all know and say that he is waiting…
He is waiting for his love, his heart, who promised to meet him there – thirty-two years ago!
They met by chance and fell in love also by chance. Then came a terrible civil war in the land which forced them to part from each other and disappear in different directions for different reasons. But before they parted they promised to meet one another again on these hills as soon as the war was over.
They stood upon these hills and made the promise. Then they departed.
The war, as all wars do, eventually ended… a full thirty-two years ago. He came to the agreed hills and began to wait. But she did not appear.
He must be sixty now, or fifty, or seventy; it’s hard to tell. He looks ageless. Only his eyes betray an age indefinable with words which, if one were to attempt to but articulate, can only be captured with the expression ever-young.
He believes she will come. He believes that she loved and still loves him just as strongly as he loved and still loves her; and any love that strong does not break its own vows; for if they can be broken, they would not have been spoken.
But people have sworn that she died in the war.
Others declare that they have seen her in a distant land in the west, married and happy.
And yet not a few maintain mournfully that she did indeed come back once, took a look at him from afar, then turned around and walked away again.
Anytime he hears any of these stories, he does not get angry, neither does he laugh. He does not dismiss them offhandedly or obstinately, no. Instead he raises his eyes, sea-deep and dead-serious, to the heavens and keeps them there for a long, long time. Then, finally, slowly, a warm smile would begin to glow on his face as he brought his bright eyes back to bear upon the speaker or speakers, informing them in a voice as unperturbed as the pacific:
“No… she is on the way…“
Those who have met him say he is a nice friendly fellow, jovial and communicative… half-the-time. The other half he is silent and lonely, wondering what could be taking her so long. In such moments, he is sorrowful, thoughtful.
I mounted the hill at the appropriate evening hour to find, see and meet this wonder for myself. My heart pounded. He is truly a legend, a hero, made of that fractionless primevium of which immortals are forged. Thirty-two years and he is still waiting, waiting, waiting for a dream… – can I do that too?
The rising moon was fuller. What would he have to say to me?
I saw his silhouette, like a human mountain, noble and undefeated, backing me, face raised to the moon, breathing, still. I approached as silently as I could, so as not to disturb the solemnity of this magic moment.
As I neared him, I saw him raise his two hands skywards for one steady arrested moment in time, like a victor, his body shuddered; then he turned around and faced me, tears and laughter in his eyes.
“Darling, what took you so long?” he whispered at me…
I had been sure that I would not cry, but now the last chains broke and fell from my heart and I ran to him, fell into his embrace, weeping uncontrollably.
Indeed what had taken me so long? I do not know. Why do we lose courage in the greater and settle for the lesser? Why do we always fear the immortal call of love? Why did I hesitate for thirty-two long years to do the one single thing that I have longed more than every other thing in the world to do? And to thereby fulfil my eternal promise. What had so scared me? The notion of eternal love or the possibility of betrayal?
And all the while he had waited, waited for me, surer than I was that I would return to my destiny…
Love cannot die.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You can read this and other short stories in my collection of short, philosophical and inspirational stories titled:
THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE.
On the way to Falkenstein
I knew you were mine
On the way from Falkenstein
I knew you were mine
But when we stood side by side
Upon that castled immortality
I knew only that the great divide
Yawns yet ‘twixt longing and reality
And if we true will call this meeting our last
Then, woman, never lie away our past.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I see only nothing –
Emptiness has suffocated the world.
Hollowness on the inside…
Bring yourself to the fore
And stop hiding like a scared animal
In the darkness of your fear of societal assumptions.
Stop being a learned act on the stage of life –
Stop being a masquerade in the market-place of shared dreams…
Be yourself!
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 