There will be hope But the heart must cope First with a season Of conflict sans reason This moon is long faced And tied to a dead sea Rolling scrolls misplaced By startled history. You must be patient Time is clairaudient It hears your heart beating And your footfalls repeating The dance to victory. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
war
THE RIVER IS RUNNING
The river is running The river of blood Swallowing up, drowning The kwashiorkor road A finger on a trigger Is going to pull one day Mushroom clouds bigger Than any from yesterday. The time has come again To learn how to survive And stand alone in your pain If only you are left alive Children torn from parents Friends and families will scatter In wars between governments Of people who think they matter. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
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
THAT SAME OLD GOAL
Parallel worlds. The Radio is whispering coming war – cultural, civil, religious, racial. It’s in people’s eyes, there’s no love for strangers anymore, and suddenly they are everywhere.
Revenge. It’s time to correct history. Power. It’s time to attain victory. And it fills you with despair because humankind never learns. They wait a few Generations, build or buy more lethal weapons, radicalise themselves and their children some more. And then they try again.
Weapons of mis-communication; weapons of mass-Propaganda; weapons of mis-education; weapons of asocialization; weapons of radicalisation; weapons of mass-destruction. Weapons of war.
And if they fail again, they’ll think it’s because their weapons, or their tactics, were not lethal enough. They’ll never question their motives or their hatred. They’ll wait another couple of Generations, and build or buy even more lethal weapons, and perfect their tactics and strategies some more. And then try again. And again.
Until Humanity destroys itself. Completely.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
TREACHERY
Was I not perhaps there with them, beneath the bombs and amidst the bullets and amongst the kids that died too easily, too early, and never rose again? Was I not perhaps there with them amidst the hoping and the despairing and the neighbours that turned too easily, too quickly, too happily, into foes – was I not really there? Aye, was I not perhaps there too, I wonder, was I not? I sometimes seem to see again the metalbirds dropping parcels of eager death and ripping the way open for birth, the painful birth of a new generation unafraid of guns, bombs and nuclear threats, and wary only of the little lies that neighbours and friends are ever wont to tell.
——————–
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
——————–
MEETING TIME
Internet battle
Between love and hate
Some call it war
Some call it debate
Some say it’s better to shoot words
Than bullets and bombs
Some say it is because of these words
That bullets and bombs come
Humankind has long yearned
To meet all humankind
Now we’re all on the same page
But still not of one mind
The war that is brewing
Wherever it takes place
You will be caught in the web
And it will be in your face.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
SOMETHING’S MISSING
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.
BIAFRANS AND NIGERIANS, YOU AND I
The Crack was so loud
We actually failed to hear
The piercing cry
We are dying even whilst they die
You struck me hard
You were hellbent on killing off
All the love in me
So that you could point at my corpse, my heart
And me the coffin housing it
And declare:
You see! He was dead all along!
And everybody will nod wisely
You cannot murder a dead man.
Africa vanished like smoke in the wind
And left Africa behind
Battling the barrenness you and I…
Strangers stood back
Watched us tear one another to pieces
And when we’re through
They’ll step in calmly and calmly pick up the pieces
And build anew an other Africa again
Their Gain
Empty of all Africans
Biafrans and Nigerians
Hutus and Tutsis, Zulus and Xhosas.
Holy Warriors,
Nationalists, Traditionalists, you
And I
And all that will remain
As a memory of a people that once was
Are the poems and songs we
Left behind…
Even the slogans will be forgotten.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
TENSE TIES
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.
PEACE IS A STRANGER
How much is peace worth?
How many countries on earth?
How many blood-sprinkled shirts?
How many interrupted births?
How many truths? How many lies?
How many will regret a compromise?
What price is worth the prize?
This is the danger:
Peace is a stranger
On earth.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 