Kindness to refugees
is salvation for humankind.
Because kindness is the refuge
for our broken humanity,
longing for healing.
Let them in
and into your heart.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
humanity
SURVIVAL SHOULD NEVER BE RACIALISED
Every global problem comes with special extra dimensions of evil for Black people.
Blacks being prevented from escaping war in Ukraine. Thrown out of busses and trains. Refused entry at the Ukraine-Poland border. Many of them students. Some of them women with children.
BUT everybody wants easy access to the minerals under African soil.
War brings out the Ugliness – and the Truth – in humanity.
I feel pain. Because you want to help others. But does anybody want to help you?
You want to show solidarity with others. But no one wants to show solidarity with you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
WEAKNESS
The greatest strength
is the strength to look beyond
your own strength
and find in your weakness
strength in other people’s strength.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
#poemsthatmakeyouthink
THE GOLDEN CALF
The golden calf of modern times is racism, dressed in nationalism and tribalism, burnished by religion. And we are all dancing around it.
The modern day biblical Aarons of today agitate and invite their people to bring all their wounded or selfish volitions and angers, throw them together into one terrifying heap and build it up into a shiny mock-sacrificial lamb statue of false beauty whose enticing radiation attracts spirits of like weakness.
Then they continually polish it, dance around it and sing sickly sweet warm songs of vicious ire and malicious fire to it; and all the while they keep on feeding it with their volitions and angers and hatred, and increasing its size. They praise and dance around their worship of their own selves and their hatred of others.
But Moses is true humanity on the Mountain-top, lonely and few, who make the effort to climb to connection to the commandments of self-conquest and selfless love. Watching the madness going on down in the valley of human soul – the madness that has engulfed the entire earth, all the continents and nations and peoples. Division is the only thing that still unites humankind.
Moses is true humanity on the Mountain-top of human nobility, lonely, clarified and few, watching the madness in the valley, and wondering if there is still any hope or still any point at all in sharing with these crazy ones the knowledge and the conviction which they carry deeply imprinted upon the inner soul-pages of their calmly flaming spirit. Love thy neighbour, as thyself.
It’s been repeated for so long, that it almost sounds like a childlike joke now. But some still believe. And I guess the children shall inherit the earth.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
THE HEART OF HUMANITY
With love we should call our children
So that with love they will come –
With love we should welcome our children
So that with love they will glow –
With love we should rear our children
So that with love they will grow –
With love we should release our children
So that with love they will go forth
And repeat the same process
With love –
Love is the only thing that makes us human –
Love is the most fundamental thing
That we should transfer from generation to generation
Through mankind –
Love is the progenitor, propagator and preserver
Of the HUMAN race –
Without love we are nothing.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
THE PATH OF HONOUR
Even when you are down
Stay upon the path of honour
And when you are up too
Forget not the path of honour
It is the safeguarding of humanity
The preservation of human nature
Each time you play fair and justly
Regardless of whether it will bring you
Success or failure.
It is not only by joining the WWF
That you can save an endangered species –
Look inward; and make your contribution
By preserving the human in you.
Is there no honour in sports anymore?
Was there never any honour in politics?
To apparel one’s self in the appearance of victory:
Is this worth every means?
When we win like this, who has lost?
Is it not humankind?
The victory of money, power, praise
Upon the path of dishonorable ways
Will haunt humanity’s last days –
It has weakened us
And we have acquired the habit
Of abandoning humanity
Each time we want to achieve our goals.
But you: Deeply observe the dying species
And reflect upon the path of honour
That it still refuses to walk.
The path of honour: Walk this way.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
PLAYGROUNDS
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.
ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR
Elementary particles
You and I
And our every thought of kindness
Wrapped up in temporary blindness
The thought will go
But the kindness in its heart will remain timeless.
Thousands of years later
Geologists can tell you where
A river once flowed.
Such is the parable of human hearts
And the tracks of our tears
And the marks we leave in each others’ lives.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
SHE WAS A WEIGHTLIFTER
She was a weightlifter
They found it unseemly
But she was a shape-shifter
Their disdain was a lighter burden to bear
Than her fate.
Slum lady. Carried mud and bricks
Bore stones and sticks
Firewood, rusted water in weeping baskets
The stretch marks of impatient thirsty men
Bunched up her muscles.
Owned by all, never owned a thing
The madams’ slaps, the masters’ secrets
Nothing was too heavy a load to carry
To snatch, to clean, to jerk off –
Each jerk. Very ordinary.
Today, when she steps out unto the mat
Under the lights, there you see
Sunset in one eye, sunrise in the other –
It’s not heavy weights she’s lifting
She’s carrying hope.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
WEALTH OF POVERTY
They shrink away instinctively
Disgustedly
From the poor
As though poverty were a disease
But even faster they
Avert their thought-sprinkled eyes
Nobody wants to see Shame
The shame mirrored within
Who is ashamed of whom?
Of what?
The rich is ashamed for being rich
The poor is ashamed for being poor
They both are ashamed of being
In the company of each other
One hopes the tides will turn
One fears the tides will turn.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 