The smiles of strangers along the way; Eyes that touch with a friendly look briefly - Just a few of these silent greetings a day Change the feel of the city, lighten it greatly. And they are there, just enough of humanity; Partake in it, for life is rushing by so quickly. Joy-givers are preservers of human dignity. Every day is a gift. Use it wisely. Be happy. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
Strangers
NATURE OR PROPENSITY
For people who, by nature, are partner-faithful and relationship-loyal (I’m talking Sex here), there exists in their inside a great big Why when they observe how a person who they know really loves his/her partner with all his/her heart can have a sexual interchange with a third party – one time, or for a shorter or longer period, or intermittently – and yet remain totally committed to and in love with their chosen “permanent” partner. Is it a predisposition or a weakness?
It’s like a puzzle, a mystery that defies solution.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
GOODBYE, LAUGHTER
Have you ever listened to
The night talking to itself
While you lay there beside one another
And not a word occurred to you?
You see the end approaching
Like a boat coming to the shore
To take you away
Away from a laughter called love
And as your worlds drift apart
In the space of one short night
Strange, but no words occur to you
To adequately say goodbye.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
TWO URGES
When the sun comes up
You will regret the night
For the world is ruled by two strangers
And they both live in you
The night awakens one stranger
Seducer, traitor, philosopher, poet
Broken hearts heal sweet wounds
Everything is allowed
Illusion. When the sun comes up
The strangers change places
You cannot undo the night
You can only regret it
Or secretly savour the memory
Of it.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
POETRY IN EVERYTHING
She stands by the roadside
Smoking her thoughts away
Thoughts she tried
Could not find the words to say
Arise dejectedly, smoke and ashes
The green light flashes.
One last drag, last sigh
Last attempt to inwardly see the way
Shoulders sag, the look in her eye
When she turns briefly her head our way
Before stepping off across the road
Is itself a long and winding road.
A Cumbrian mountain-walk
Winding past trees and waterfalls
Feet heavied, it’s your heart bears the bulk
Of any stray Sorrow that calls
Many strange paths will cross your feet
Follow not every path you meet…
A short smile crosses her face
Our eyes meet, a moment of connection
A smile at once everything unitable in one place
Joy, sorrow, interest, disaffection
The smile’s source is its end
Just made and lost a friend.
Deep, the heart of every wanderer
Your path is the outgrowth of your heart
Gently touch, gently leave each sojourner
Take solely what the moment did impart
There’ll be enough in it to sorrow or sing
Poetry lurks in everything.
A moment in time, no content, no words
A mighty happening just played itself out
She crosses the road, I turn off at the boards
Never again will our paths cross, no doubt –
My woman walking beside me the whole time
Did she sense at all this passing rhyme?
The small, silent things that come and go
Without our really paying attention
The rock-solid things our hearts know
Even when we pay no attention –
The inner bond that withstands passing things
Takes note of the closing of little rings.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
MIGRATORY MAN
Unusual is the hand
That can count backwards
The name of the original land
That birthed its ancestors forwards
Every many generations the slate is wiped clean
You think you are there where you always have been
But most every native is a fruit of some old migrant tree
That forgot its deep roots in some distant ancient century
And some disappeared Country.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
TWICE IS NOT ENOUGH – pt. 7
Ada slipped open the sixth and final poem in the small collection –
YOUNG AGAIN –
Those were the words, that was the title.
“Were we ever young?”
“Did we ever age?”
Neither replied the other. Each had spoken for the other.
This last poem, for some reason, was italicised from first word to last. We shall be young one day again, younger than we ever were, young as ageless eternity. YOUNG AGAIN.
It becomes simple
Crosses threshold
Mortality into immortality
Denseness into quickness
Old into new, call it young
The good become older
Grow younger
Younger and younger and younger
The better you
Lighter and truer
Younger grow
Let us all grow young again
Fill the Earth with laughter
With truth, with youth –
Ngozi looked into Ada’s eyes and said:
“I want to see Tony again.”
There was a pause. But did a spell break somewhere quietly? Or were we never there?
“Do you have a telephone?” Ngozi pressed, trying to interpret Ada’s silence. It must mean something.
Suddenly Ada was taken aback.
A spell seemed indeed to abruptly lift itself off her and, in its place, her thinking cap, invisible on her head but visible in the sudden, guarded look in her eyes, treacherous windows, descended, full of fears and cleverness and innumerable bad memories, upon her. She was suddenly appalled at herself, and the last twenty minutes swiftly took on the aspect of a fairy-tale, a dream. Had it really happened? Who was this strange woman beside whom she was sitting, sharing the intimate poems of her brother with, like old friends. She experienced the sensation of having been swiftly disarmed and intruded upon, and even, oddly, deceived.
Her head moved back a fraction of a unit of precise measurement and re-appraised Ngozi with suspicious, half-friendly, half-unfriendly, unsure eyes. Like it was in the beginning. – Yes? Who are you?
The returning silence, cold and dividing, began to mature.
Ngozi suddenly understood Ada. She smiled tenderly. Into her handbag she reached, extracted a black, silver-capped pen and then a tiny slip of blue paper. Carefully she balanced the little paper on the side of her bag and, luckily, the bus was temporarily caught in a traffic-jam at Ijaiye. The type that Lagosians call the Standstill, in contradistinction to the Go-Slow and the Hold-up.
Quickly she wrote her name and telephone number down, then wordlessly handed it over to Ada.
“That’s my office telephone number. Please tell him I said Hi.” She smiled again, then turned her head forward; then turned back again, smiling even more disarmingly and added: “and, oh, by the way… Merry Christmas – one day in arrears.”
“Same to you too…”
Ngozi had turned her face away. She didn’t speak again. At the next bus-stop, Iyana-Meiran, she alighted from the bus and left a thoughtful Ada again without her presence, as it was in the beginning.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Part 6
Part 5
Part 4
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1
(This is the end of the excerpts. The whole book can be obtained via Amazon)
Read the full book:
SOMETHING TO HOLD ON TO
If a true friend is gold, are they poor that have no friends? Or rich by default, for peace of mind is also the lot of the lonely who is spared the irony of the laughter and companionship of false friends? How often have we met with a friend and parted from a stranger a short while later? In these days of sad revolutions and mixed allegations, of spying and cyber double lives, of migration without integration, of religious justice without religious love, of racial reawakening and regrouping, gender re-evaluation, of social re-engineering and hardening, there are some you will meet who will tell you that what they need is not a friend, what they need is honesty and clarity.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
SOLIDARITY WITH SELF
Your brother in the ghetto
Is still your brother –
He might not have attended
The same type of schools as you did
He might not have acquired
The same kind of polish as you did
He might not even know
That you’re not as different from him
As he thinks
He might think
What you think: you’ve become strangers
No. He is still your brother
And when a bullet comes in the dark
It can’t tell the difference between you and you.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
THE WAY
I WAS wondering in the dark, searching for my hands, for my feet, my voice, my mind. I sought all these things, but knew not that I was searching in the dark. In a strange valley that wipes away memory. Truly I was wandering too in the dark.
There are friends that stand around us in the dark, more in number than we know, nearer than we sense, they see us but we do not see them. For, self-centered us, we see only ourselves.
There was a self-centered man, and he never saw anything but himself. His own wants, his own needs, his own hopes, his own fears, his own hunger and thirst, his own pain, joy, views, his own creed.
There he was, wandering in the dark, lonely and alone, thinking he is all alone in the world. Not once does the thought of another cross his mind, for he has long lost the ability to see any other person but himself. A hundred questions trouble his mind, to which he finds no answers. It is dark. Some helpers stand around him, trying to draw his attention for once away from his own ego, for these helpers have the answers he craves. But he sees them not; he has long lost the ability to see any other but himself.
What are these rocks that strike and bleed his feet? He knows not, he sees them not. The light with which to see them is not visible to him. He sees only himself, nothing else. His inner eyes are closed, where is the insight with which to see the inner light? A misty lake has become his insight; therein, trapped, his egotistical love for himself.
So did we wander side by side for decades, centuries, blind to one another, unconscious of each another, for each of us was self-centered. Slowly I started to long for an end to this grey solitude, this heavy empty aloneness. Then did a thought, dimly, strike me, in the depths of my lonely suffering. The thought that this lonely life I led was so sad, so depressing that I would never wish it for anybody else….
– stop. What was that?
Anybody else? … What strange thought is this that strikes me? Is there anything like somebody else? Am I not alone in the world? Could there be any other person here? Struggling in this dark blindness too? A strange new thought that nagged at, and grew in, my heart. If there were anybody else, then would that I could find him, maybe even help him, halve his frustration. – Like a miracle, this thought became a light within me, slowly did my inner eye open.
And… I saw myself in a Valley… walking beside a man who seemed faintly familiar, with the soft sun shinning far away, dimly but visibly. But though I called and called to him, this strangely familiar man, yet he heard me not, felt not my touch. And lo and behold, not he alone, but hundreds, thousands, millions like us were wandering blind in the Valley of Self-centeredness. Unreachable. Alone. I had been simply one of many all this time and I had not known. So deep was my shock that it loosened my heart and set my tears free. Only half the tears were for me. The rest were for my fellow wanderers, as blinded by self-centeredness as I had until recently been. And yet all they need in order to awaken is just once to think of another… spare a thought for another. Focus again on the thought that there are also other people in this world, think of their needs, feel the desire to understand and to help someone else.
After the tears had started to flow from my eyes, I heard a voice. There was a woman walking behind me.
“Did you say something to me?”, I asked, surprised, as I turned to her. She had a voice like a bird singing. She too I seemed to almost remember.
“Osahon, my friend”, she said, “I have been calling your name now for many many decades, patiently trying to awaken you to the way that leads out of this Valley wherein you have been groping…”
“You?… Calling me for decades? Has it been that long? Yet I heard nothing…”
“It is because you have stepped off the way.”
“And where lies the way?” I asked, still dazed, still grappling this new awakening.
And she pointed to my neighbour, he who had been by my side all this time, unnoticed by me, unconscious of me.
“Walk with him a couple of miles. Find out what he needs, and try to give it to him. Therein lies the way.”
“But who is he?” I asked.
“That is Erobo. You were his friend, to whom he once looked up, once upon a time…, like I too once was your star, before we both went blind. Before the bird came to wake me up again. Long long ago. Do you remember?” –
Like a mist slowly parting did I gently recall distant friendships, selfless love, ancient, bright sunlight once upon a time. And as I did, so did the Valley become ever brighter, for this faint Sun had always been there. Only I had gone blind.
“This is what happens,” my ancient lover continued, “when self-centeredness takes over within the soul. So do memory, connection and awareness fade… This is what happens when self-centeredness takes over within our souls.”
I gazed at Efe, my one true love. How could I have forgotten her all this time? … Then I turned and beheld once more my very best friend, Erobo, he who had once been to me even as a brother. Softly I called his name, then louder, until I was shouting it. And yet he heard not.
“He hears you not,” Efe sorrowfully said. “He hears only his own thoughts, and knows not that any other thing exists. And all this he once learned from you,” she said softly to me, “For he has always followed you.
Yet wipe your eyes, stand by his side and keep on calling his name… Weary not, but love him even as you love yourself.”
At first I felt a sense of guilt. I reflected upon this mystery: You can lead a man in, but not out. The thought of an unending, unrewarding sojourn beside an unresponsive soul suddenly brought a hesitation upon me. I looked at the multitude of sleepwalkers around me in the valley, and saw behind so many of them a Helper, bound to each as by an invisible thread, trying to reach them. Tenacious thoughts. They arose again in me. What of my own goals? What of my own wants? A frown, a dark cloud came over my brow, I slowly sunk into brooding –
“Osahon… my friend – “
Startled I looked up. My gaze, as from far away, settled again upon Efe. Her hand was upon my shoulder. A smile was her face. A sad smile, it pierced my core. And then did drop the last chain. I turned again to Erobo, my best friend, placed a hand on his shoulder and began to talk to him, calling his name, telling him of the sun and of friendship and of helpfulness and of the way out of the Valley. Out of my words I made a song, which I am still singing…
“And should he one day awaken and his blind eyes open before Time bids you stop,” my Lover continued, her last words to me, before she left to go there where she must await me, “ … and should he then weary too of selfishness, and desire a way out of this half-lit Valley, then show him also this Way which I have just shown to you, teach it to him gently, and remind him of it should he quickly forget too… – for there is no other way that leads out of this Valley, but the way of selfless love.”
Then I saw her walking away, following a distant bird. When I weary I think of her and of her selfless love; and thus, I too am still talking to my friend.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
From my collection of thoughts and short stories: THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 