Blood is Water & Other Poems
Blood is Water
He is a walking latrine,
wherever he goes, whatever he does,
you can see the trail of smell he leaves behind;
he urinates, defecates, spits and vomits on each street,
every gutter, field and garden he comes across
and for him, there is no difference between spaces
reserved for decency and desolation,
between curses and blessings,
cleanliness and dirtiness, war and peace,
between construction and destruction.
Where there is life, he sees death,
where there is food and abundance, he sees drought,
poverty, starvation and scarcity.
Suffering and pain for him are pearls,
through which he adds colour to his life
and the gold of his heart is the grief he inflicts
on those who have no strength to weep.
Gardens litter his city, but he sees flowers as stones,
the rose is a stream of blood,
the hibiscus is a sword of slicing hedges
and every apple hanging on the tree
is to shoot his foes and friends.
He was born during the war, and blood is his water,
which he drinks until he becomes his victims
and walks around as the vengeance of his soul.
Now, he can see the boundaries his God has set
and he oversteps it with his second breath,
his instalment burial is without a funeral;
hence, he yearns for peace
as the desert pants for water.
A Thousand Seasons of Summer
If you ask me about the chains of the night,
who would I ask to roll away my stone?
Who would die like Jesus in my place?
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
My life is the touching of naked wires
a thousand times, I flirted with danger
courted risks with manifcured courage
to walk on the thin skin of life.
Something dead clutches my throat
each time I want to sing of my miracles,
each time, I want to hear the clouds
singing in the sky with a voice like silk
Like in my dreams, when I run from darkness
it catches up with me and grips me close;
all I have going is this feeling of being dead
and waking up in the morning, dying again.
My heels don’t follow me into the day,
when the sun casts no shadows of me;
though I know what horror fear is,
like an ocean where a forest lurks around.
Over a thousand years, I went untouched,
unharmed, untainted and undetected;
but now I am arrayed in the limelight,
and lie disarrayed in the blustery wind.
Once, a man called me too cool to die;
another called me a garden of a thousand leaves;
yet another shouted my name from treetops,
that I was too invisible to die a second time
But, let us say I’m an ageing opera,
where trumpets and grasshoppers are sand,
and I sing of lost paradise, of deepening abyss,
will I not survive the splitting of my life?
I relish it when they call me an outsider,
like I don’t belong to the clique of eclipse
of those harangued by hunger’s despair,
and harassed by imminent dangers at random,
It’s a thousand seasons of summer,
but there is no sun, no light;
in the dark, the fingers of the sun
search for the hem of my black shirt.
And all I can do is to seek some peace
that my brows may knit together without war,
and the love that passes all understanding
will cuddle my heart, my bones and blood.
Redemption
The day was going bad for me,
with the sun hiding behind the mango tree,
and the afternoon stars losing their teeth;
there was no shadow of light,
waiting to blossom when the trees bend,
or when waves shove the tall flowers aside.
I put on my pyjamas to go to bed,
with darkness approaching, no man can dare
into the deep of the night,
or the nylon black cloth of the day;
I decided to let my desire slide.
I lifted my eyes before I closed my eyes,
and saw a flickering finger of the sun
sticking out through the clouds;
it was red and the clouds were blue,
and I knew there was no way,
that could stay still over the night.
I remember the three fingers of clouds
that brought a downpour on a dry city,
stopped the famine, stopped the war
and saved a million burn-out lives.
I leapt out of my wet bed,
time to change my story,
to put on my clothes, and boots, comb my hair,
and rush out in pursuit of the finishing line.
Joy masked my pain like a veil;
tears and sweats of redemption
gushed out of my pesky skin pores,
like gold handkerchiefs from a silver hole.
How I deserved mercy was what I could not tell.
Resistance
The waves surge against the rocks,
they push back the water,
the waves return,
the rocks resist;
a pelting of lumps,
a vortex of violence,
a breaking of the resistance,
the waves return to the vortex
where the apocalypse waits
like an angel with a mandate to bless
but a compulsion to kill
a compulsion not to say a prayer.
The centre cooks cracks,
the cavity becomes wider
at every surge, every trembling
of the rocks’ galaxy;
sliced in two, three or four,
unity becomes a garbage
and there is a body,
lying face down in the middle
of the broken rocks
when the heart suffers
Though time freezes,
there is no ease for dying rocks;
everything seems endless,
sadness, sorrow, pelting,
the wet alchemy of spring,
the waste of energy on death,
the fury of the neglected future,
or the abandoned past.
Between us, there is the explosion
of the things we worshipped,
things we glorified,
the peace we magnified.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in, TABs The Journal of Arts and Poetics, Unleash Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. He was the Editor’s Choice Prize Winner of Unleash Lit in 2024. He was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize 2024 and the Second Poetry Prize Winner of The Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024.