I am a very open person If you come into my life I will open up to you But I will open you up too If you are not ready to be open Don’t come into my life Because I will naked you And get to the core of You What we see when we get there We might not like But we will understand and trust each other From that moment onwards Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
open
THE HAPPY SADNESS OF MUSICIANS
Every Tuesday
They gather here
A flock of wild geese
And play for nobody
Their smiles
Each time their smiles
Break my heart
Open Stage
Not a dime
What’s their crime?
Listen in
To the sound of happiness
It is full of sadness
Life is music
Friends are memory
Death is immortality.
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che chidi chukwumerije
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BEING DIFFERENT
UNRAVELLING THE mystery that is my own soul, I pondered and sought; I wondered about my beginning. Woman and man in a garden. Which garden? East or west? Home is best, they say.
So I went home into my spirit-man and discovered an a different person dwelling within, staring back at me with my own face but not my own eyes.
“Different person,” I asked him, “Who are you and what are you doing inside my heart?”
But he only returned my gaze without giving an answer, and I sensed that I must find the answer myself. Myself? But who is myself?
The mystery took shape, deepened, arose. I wandered from pole to pole. But each time I thought I had found my goal, I saw the different person inside my heart again, looking back at me with my own face but not with my own eyes.
I wanted to scream, but my heart rejected this. I lay me down to sleep, but sleep ejected me. So on and on I wander and sojourn, on and on I go, seeking to unravel this mystery that is simply my very own self.
And each time I think I have found the answer, I see him again, a different person inside my soul, staring back at me with my face but not with my eyes.
Who are you, I wonder, you stranger in my soul?
What are you, why are you, so different, so alien, so silent, so bold?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
LOOK AGAIN
And then you will see
That blind people see
The things that are invisible
To you and to me
And then you will hear
What the deaf loudly hear
When silence is all
That you and I hear
And then you will understand
That children understand
To store deep in their memory
Things they don’t yet understand
When a moment full of pain
Opens up your heart again
And you learn to look again
And see again, and hear again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 