Walking myself Through the corridors of dull greyness Talking to myself Until I become free of all my bitterness For it doesn’t matter who has hurt me I am nothing special I have hurt many too, irreparably, deeply, With this my heart must wrestle. Walking and whistling Talking and thinking Of what I’m receiving Whenever I’m grieving Spiritual resetting Not ever forgetting Destiny re-weaving Deep inner perceiving. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
Reflection
THE RIVER OF REFLECTION
If one day you see yourself
On the other side of the river
And yourself tells himself
To move on and forgive her
And yourself turns around
And walks into the distance
And you’re left with the sound
Of the inner river’s dance
Will you follow your inner self
Across the river of reflection?
Or will you follow your inner self
In the opposite direction?
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river
VULNERABILITY
Waking up
Feeling like a wound
And for a second you don’t cover up your vulnerability
Because the world is still asleep
And no-one is watching…
You lie there, your eyes closed
Your wound open
And let your life’s troubles tear at the wound
In your Heart…
And then,
Just when the pain becomes unbearable
You feel the calming weight of responsibility
Descend like balm and bandage upon you
You know your role again
You become strong.
And by the time you open your eyes and arise
The wound has been stitched up again
And you set forth to meet the world
Unperturbed
Resolved.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF
A man searches for
The man in the mirror
A woman searches
For the
Woman in the water
A man will stand his ground
A woman will wet her ground
I don’t understand gender roles
But I understand tender truths.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
THOUGHTS AT THE DEPARTURE TERMINAL
I will soon spread my wings and fly away. Who will come with me? Whom will I leave behind? What will happen when I’m gone? What will they say? Will the sky still be blue? Will the waters still bear sailing ships? Will the earth still revolve around the sun? Will they remember me here after a little while, or will I fade away in their memories like innumerable disappeared friends from once upon a time? But this is behind me now.
Have I broken hearts? Have I healed broken hearts? Have I quickened hearts and brought adventure into other people’s lives, raw new adventure? Am I a burden on anyone? Then we must part now.
Have I wrought damage beyond salvage? Have I done much more than can be remedied? Am I a ghost? Am I a thing of joy? Am I a precious memory? Am I still there? Am I still there? If I go, will I ever return? Goodbye now.
My life is full these days, full of partings and goodbyes. They come in the form of meetings, unitings and re-unifications; but at the end they shed their cloaks and reveal that they always were, from the beginning, another separation.
Farewell, farewell now.
————–
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
————–
A POET’S HEART
SOMETIMES THE night is so incredibly beautiful, I wish it would last a little longer tonight. Everywhere, everything is so soft. The night air is cool, soft. The vibration of the world, of my neighbourhood, has lost its harshness and it seems as though everybody loves everybody tonight. And I am glad again that I was born a poet.
I will live a poet and when I die, the world will say: a poet is gone. And if the world mourns, then I will be glad I disappointed the world and became a poet instead of a lawyer, engineer, banker, doctor, scientist, professor emeritus.
The poem that I wanted to write on the day I took the decision and forsook the world, I have now forgotten. Forgotten if I even wrote it at all or whether I kept it back in, bolted up in the hall of silence in my soul, where I continued to nourish it, and perhaps only wrote it another day in another poem, or maybe I’ve not even written it yet.
And yet, for its sake, and for the sake of a thousand and more poems yet unwritten, I disobeyed, ignored and disappointed the world, I dropped out of school, forsook a supposedly great destiny and became just a poet struggling to get by.
And yet I know, when I die they will say wistfully, with wet eyes: a poet is gone…
And they will feel it in their hearts. –
So poets are special afterall.
Sometimes the night is so beautiful and I wish it would last a little longer tonight, and I’m glad I was born a poet. Even when I’m dead and gone I’ll leave behind upon the sad earth a few lines that will forever move human hearts and they will nod thoughtfully and say: once upon a time, a poet was born… he lived on earth, he wrote poems and he died…
They will say this because poems don’t die and, in truth, poets too are immortal. None is so immortal as they that cook with letters, build with words and touch us not with fingers or lips, pictures or songs, as precious as these are, for who can live without love and kindness, music and art, but there is a special quality of perception that works wonders and magic within us when language, this device we so casually misuse and abuse everyday, is made into the container and preserver for generations to come of something that goes right into our core and makes us glad that the poet did not fail to write once upon a time.
And last night it was so beautiful. I was all alone and only once was I called upon, in the night, by the rain… it was at my window, poetic, heavenly, cold, sweet and temporary… it passed away, and took with it the last traces of the receding harmattan.
And I hoped the night would for once last a little longer last night, yet knew my hope was folly. Twice I slept anew, twice awoke, and the night was still with us and still so soft, and I thought of you, in the night.
And I slept again and when I opened my eyes the sun was shinning, the night is gone and I began to write this story of all that happens and happens never, but remembered ever by the works of the poetic spirit.
Birds are chirping. People are yapping outside my window too. Lagos is beautiful only at night when NEPA provides us with electricity and the fan or A/C is working, or else it needs must rain and the roof better not be leaking. But if you are lucky, you have a generator. Or a guitar. Best of all of course is the cooling cooling rain.
That is when Lagos is most beautiful. When the Water falls…
I thirst after you
Waterfall
I want to
Drink you up
I am
The quivering starving lake
Underneath the Souls of
Your feet
Step on me
I will carry you to your river
I am your horizon
You are my ocean.
The reading is taking place next Saturday. Who will be there? Nobody I know, naturally. Of course they will all think I know them and they know me. We will shake hands and call one another by our names and remember some incidents from the populous empty past.
Yet I know them not and they know me not. We are all strangers to one another. This is the city, where neighbours and friends and strangers are all strangers to one another, and the city is the strangest one of all amongst us, the laughing, mute, cunning, open, mocking, sorrowing city. Community of strangers and, maybe, one friend for a little while, once in a while. Baby, are you still my friend? Friendship dies in the night when no-one is looking and no-one can say later exactly what went wrong.
Why are people always staring? In the bus, on the streets, everywhere. They point their eyes at one and STARE! Walking with her, she said I’ve learnt to ignore them. Well, I haven’t.
I remember, many years ago, when I was a teenager, someone said to me: you’ve got to learn to either soften the look in your eyes or desist from looking too strongly into girl’s eyes. You confuse them. You make them think you’re in love with them. You invite them to fall in love with you. You seem to promise them eternal, warm, caring love with your eyes.
I smiled, slightly confused. But I knew she must know what she was saying. She was my cousin and knew my eyes and what lies ever behind them.
We went to the library, to check up on the progress and make final arrangements. I got there first. Everything, like almost always in Nigeria, is being rushed through in the last moments. The reading is on Saturday. Yesterday was Monday, full of freshly awakened poetry. Everybody full of new lines, composed in their hearts over the weekend, strutting upon the stage, playing their parts, artistically, as though it wasn’t all an act. Yesterday was Monday.
Monday, some say, is a slow day. Others say it is a fast day, hectic, with everything happening too fast for them to follow. It is, for some, a hard day, for others a dreamy one. Monday is an okay day, I guess. Afterall Monday is Sunday’s child. Beautiful, deep Sunday. Land of answers.
She looked charged full of energy, as always. We collected the requisite material, first from the library, then from the publisher, then picked up a part of the decoration and headed for the venue. We spoke of this and that along the way, but said more with silence and thought thoughts than with words, spoken words. We really are close, a closeness many people would not understand. They would think of other things, as usual. And miss the very point.
We separate along the way, and meet again at the sponsors’ and then return to the venue for the press conference.
Flow up and be free and be happy forever.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
from THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE, by Che Chidi Chukwumerije
THE DAILY TRAINRIDE
In the skyline grey
Memory hung
The future gone astray
Emptiness stung
Hung with reality in the greying city
The dying trees, the loveless pity
Duplicity and winding and twisting, reflecting
The beast in the best of the robots erecting
Their concrete phalli, their bull’s I’s, to scratch the sky
The insatiable itch, impotent ambition, try and try
And try as you might, your might is the limp cloud
The wilted grass, the lonely office, the empty crowd
The quiet madness, the gory glory
The daily trainride into another same story
The casual business of getting by
Between yesterday and tomorrow
A moment of reflection, gone, a sigh
Of something neither joy nor sorrow.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
MY POETRY BENCH
There is a graveyard thence
With benches placed all over
Where people come a-steady
To ponder life and death
There is a certain bench
Apart from every other
Where I sit when poetry
Takes clean away my breath.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
AN OBSERVANT LAKE
How much of it is left?
How much of the mist
Still revisits my mornings
Before my thoughts come calling?
From afar, I
Mean from gazing
Across time, it
Is a wonder to hold in
Your heart a
Thing that never
Fades, never
Weakens, changes
Never, teaches you how
To know the
Things you really
Love. They are the
Ones you never
Forget.
This carry with you as you mature
Measure with this everything you nurture
The camera behind your mind
Will click and capture
A lifelong picture
Of the things that slipped through,
The people and places that got to the core of you.
It will continue to happen inside, an observant lake
Like another part of you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Cumbrian Lines: Poems Inspired By The Lake District.
MUSICIAN’S MORNING
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.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 