When I Was a Child
Even while I was in the womb, I had a dream,
that, at my appearance, daylight would not cease,
that darkness would not be a climate to linger
wherever I was going to place my feet.
I dreamed that stars formed a long queue,
and at my entrance bow their heads like trees;
let me walk through the royal path,
let me be the stream running through the road.
I dreamed that mushrooms littered in blue,
Every foundation stone and grass on my way,
all I needed was to stretch, stoop and slice
as much as I needed to survive tomorrow.
I dreamed that flowers laced up my body,
the same way grass laced up the ground,
clothing was a luxury, and bathing was vain,
for a body encased in youth and eternity.
Now, I have grown and seen the bitterness,
the open, spiky thorns, the sharp needles,
which even gardens sprout up in silence,
awaiting the hour I step out to grow.
Now, the sky is cloudless and yellowish,
and the stars have no names for me;
I must lose myself in the large expanse of rivers,
and in due time learn to swim through the swamp.
When I was a child, I lived and thought like a child,
I saw things with the eyes of childhood and infancy,
eyes gloved with flowers, decorated in pink and green,
untouched by brambles, unscathed by the secret wind.
~~~~~
A Memory of Hope
Against every glimmer of hope, I hope.
I see the sky burning, the clouds turning to ashes;
I watch the sun break like a ball of glass,
the fields are aflame with fire,
the grass is hot with the splinters and embers.
Whatever that lies beneath the earth is the earth,
and glory arrives without glory.
When the sea howls at the river,
it’s not the beginning of its beginning,
but an ending must not have a beginning
when the beginning is the end.
Yet, against hope, I will hope.
I carry memories beyond the walls
where the sun falls and breaks into pieces;
where the ground has not acquired hands
to receive whatever has no fear of falling.
Beneath the moon, there is the moon
where the sun is a caricature of light,
where darkness regales the leaves with fire,
burning the clouds into churning dust.
See how the silence of the night sweetens the moon,
which relaxes in the amber of the sky,
but what stays after the dawn is dead,
has nothing to offer the broken fragments.
What can the morning offer to the night
which has grown sharp claws for its joy,
yet, wherever hope is dead, it’s reborn,
casting the dying where there’s nothing more to say.
Between lies tossed in my thighs,
I have tried to recapture the truth before its death,
if its living has become a time’s bargain,
yet, against this hope, I will hope,
the dead of memory, the chasm without emptiness.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from the UK with his family. His poems have been featured in the Atticus Review, San Antonio Review, The Ephemeral Literary Review, Strange Horizons, The Pierian, The Unleash Lit and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Alexander Pope Poetry Award 2023 and the second runner-up of the Wingless Dreamer Publishing Poetry Prize 2023.
