Jonathan Chibuike Ukah lives in the UK. His poems have appeared in NDQ, The Pierian, Boomer Literary Magazine, Strange Horizons, Kingsman Quarterly and elsewhere. He won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest 2022 and he was a finalist of the African Diaspora Award 2023.
My Love Is a Tourist Attraction
I can sing of the deep grief gripping me,
which I inherited from my father;
I can sing of the hollow carved in my heart
where your head can no longer penetrate;
nothing makes sense to me anymore,
since I have not found the time to cleave.
My birth was a prayer; my death was a commission,
between life and death, there is enough rain;
though I have taken a long walk towards you,
I will meet you in the middle of your life.
We will raise our hands to pluck plums from the sky
and make Heaven our flowery garden.
Like the palm fruit growing on the tip of a palm leaf,
my love is a spider, a scorpion, a gnat,
squatting on the edge of your heart;
the snake curls at the corners of your eyes;
so I will dip my finger into the flames of your heart,
withdrawing is as scalding as poking into the abyss.
So will our love be but a tourist attraction,
the Big Ben; the gentle Tussauds in the middle,
there, traffic is a nightmare and loneliness a burning pillar;
there will never be an overdose of shock,
when we have starved of normality,
when we are getting older, retreating from the shoreline.
When I Need You
In the beginning, I hated you,
because I didn’t know you,
I scorned the air that had traces of you,
the wind that carried your sighs;
and despised the ground with your footprints
and the sky for allowing rain to fall on your face.
I wanted the clouds to cover the glory of the sun
struggling to penetrate your eyes;
and when I saw the daggers of the moon
coming directly at me,
I hurled a stone at it and pointed at you.
Now I have come to know you,
my centre is collapsing before me;
those I loved have come out to tear me
into shreds beyond recognition;
I know that I need you now
because you are the only one
with whom I can spend a frenzied eternity
without mending my tattered heart.
My soul is like a torn and worn-out cloth,
a heap of black debris on the dark side of the moon,
but you will peel away this layer of death
and put new and fresh clothes on my body.
The night I could not clasp my eyes,
you sat upright till morning, cradling my temple,
singing in the heat of Jehovah’s hymns;
then killer mosquitoes arrived with Dracula molars,
poised to suck up my last drop of blood;
you grabbed a glove and clapped them to death;
you squeezed them into a porridge of lifeless flies
where their bodies awaited your devil’s broom.
These you did that I might lie in sleep
and wake up to know how much I needed you.