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By Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
(Twitter: @johnking1502
Instagram: johnking1502
Facebook: chibuikeuasoanya)
"The Cape of Good Hope"
Sleeping and waking up in the garden of love,
we wear laurels when we become ashes
long before we begin to burn;
we dump our bodies in shallow graves
long before we breathe our last;
we are soft, tender, thin and malleable,
succulent oracles of those willing to fall
with no burial in Hope’s wooden coffin.
We unfollow the angle of our stars,
where beauty can no longer see our dreams,
celebrating the gloom and the doomed;
we hear the deep moans of the lost falcon,
and the whining of the restless chrysanthemum,
complaining it no longer understands our tongue;
we speak in strange languages, exhale foreign fears,
and dance to the music of the lotus eaters.
The teeth of our forefathers are on the edge
by the sweet-smelling grapes of tomorrow;
imprisoned within the murky walls of today,
enslaved by their inability to see the shimmering light;
today's sorrows drown the clang of tomorrow's joy.
Gradually, we morph into depressed ancient mariners,
slaughtering our albatrosses with wacky weapons,
seeing mountains but no gardens deep in sight.
The last vestiges of melancholy, the debris of the sun,
which has carved us into shadows swept ashore,
wind-whipped, weather-beaten brows of broken hearts,
we are bodies succumbing to the wiles of losses,
bodies forgetting their slow, inevitable decaying,
packaged within the lustreless envelope of lost time.
We who carry hopelessness like our eyes,
despair like eyelids and frustration like makeup.
"A Second Coming"
The gong of immortality hits a backward note
and it’s time to bring the chickens to roost,
it’s time to count our teeth with our tongue
without inviting lizards to a feast of flesh;
see the sky is turning brown and red,
each time our breath turns pale and stale,
restless like the wind-tossed leaf mid-air;
the clouds mourn so early in the morning,
the moon doesn’t want to outshine the sun
for fear of killing its potential for a second coming;
a swift and fell swoop can destroy the phoenix,
giving us a goosebump in time to arrange our funeral
when we dig up stones to bump the bird within.
Now that we are here, we must make the hay
to eclipse the time without an iota of doubt,
send the night to bed to give birth to morning,
if we wish to secure the promise of a second coming.
But if we no longer seek a second adventure
let the clouds never turn too pale the day
or fill with joy a heart inebriated with sorrow;
let despair be like the tortoise without flaming wings
to fly to horizons that will bring forth some happiness,
in the disguise of fulfilling some dreams.
We will build a fortress against our immortality
when we dance to time and create our replacement.
though a song repeated had better be more beautiful,
than the terrible night that steals the sunrise,
and gracefully prevents another coming.
"My Father’s Eyes"
My father's eyes are like the dew
that never closes at night;
The steam supplying sunlight to his forehead,
slices through branches of trees,
Cuts across hard blades of leaves,
molten gold in the morning,
Like slim shafts of light,
adding its glow to the fire in his eyes.
When things don't go right his way,
the dews are the perfume of his face,
The oil of the palm kernel,
sometimes hide the frost from his heart.
My father is like a lone bird
straddling the crimson sky,
Whose surroundings are the grey landscape
of verdant trees, dying grapes, moist lake,
Littered with crumpled grass, broken twigs,
twisted limbs of lizards and cockroaches shut down
In a little moment of misunderstanding
it is striking how my father's eyes lead me to believe
There is more love than hate in this world
but the dews in his eyes hide his dying.
"Day of Reckoning"
When my mother died, I wore her body
like armour and marched into the future,
broke through the steel gates of Heaven,
smashed the sealed door, tore the ceiling,
I saw the breakdown of the system,
the security scampered like rabbits,
scrambling from a burning hole, scampering
without watching, without knowing their destination.
I saw the leaders with wide, huge eyes,
blowing up their iron eyebrows,
their heavy, steel boots thudded on the ground
like a thousand robots on a blind mission to space.
"What We Owe Ourselves"
A warm and quiet place in the sky,
where we will outstretch our arms,
unfold and celebrate our remaking;
A river of grandeur like the Thames,
we must never lack drinking water,
or spiral into little hopeless drops;
A sentient stand in the raspy River;
which is the autograph for our rebranding,
our first baptism into a new body;
But to learn the depth of our suffering,
of the little fishes and smaller sharks,
we carry this liquid map everywhere;
A hut of mirrors inside the forest
where lions and hyenas build their altars
and coerce the little ones to worship them;
The price we pay for living
is more than the cost of our life,
the substance of our deliverance;
A room in the sun without a crowd,
but if we must survive a second of eternity,
our body gears must be from the air.
Deep down the drain, our glory dies,
surrendered in a cesspool of hate,
the caustic death of us all.
We must erect a sandcastle in the desert,
and live with a continent of candles
without waking up screaming for water.
Of what use then is this body
which we lift well above our heads,
and block our hearts with their weight?
Who can remember the last time
when soft empathy lifted our hands,
and dropped a sip of kindness on others’ lips?
And remember, we are little turtles
who live in little sandboxes,
while snapping at fretting mosquitoes.
About The Author:
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah lives in the UK with his family. His poems have been featured and will soon be featured in Remington Review, Atticus Review, The Pierian, North Dakota Quarterly, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Compass Rose Literary Magazine, etc. He is a winner of the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest 2022. He is also working on his first anthology.
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