John Chinaka Onyeche's Poems

Breathing in pages of papers

And let us say these prayers again

If it is not what it is to be a writer

That when the last bell is tolled on

We will meet again.

With our hands clung to pages of papers

Where we had written our unheard pains

And the world thought we were jokes

For the words and languages, we experiment

But no, never they understood us

They never knew what pain we bear in our hearts

Like the cymbal clashes for tones

Our hearts were heated and hit by pains

That we think of nothing again but words

And these words that we hide within them

In these pages of papers, we will be found

Breathing after this breath is put away in death

When I think of you, my Africa

From this forest to no-land

From no-land to this forest

We are sitting as its survival

From the blackness of our tales

From the tales of our blackness

We are still survival of the earth

-the indigenous people of this land

Born to bear the brunt of history

The history we have failed to learn from

The same keeps repeating itself in our hands

Like scooping water into a basket

The water runs back to its source

Nights that echo back our names

When the nights come without twinkling stars, I

have learned the act of surviving your absence, as

this is another way for a dark-skin lad to make his

beds in memories of the future he knows not. I have

mastered this art now, this art where I tucked in

between my palms - our pictures, those we took

when we exchanged those vows before men and

angels that we will live for each other till the stars

are no more in the firmament of our hearts. I know

that this was not one of those promises whispered

behind the walls of my heart - that you had longed

for this one lost - lad to call your own. But it is a

decade now since you enticed the Moon into your

palms and shaded it not to give its light for a

sojourner with time and to a peaceful - night - walk

with your man in the meadows - of fringed petals -.

For loving you now, a terror to behold by the same

hands that held you yesterday and called you

beloved. Now, how is this love misjudged and

killed at the altar of tongues unbridled for the nights

that echo back our names?

    © John Chinaka Onyeche

John Chinaka Onyeche is an author, poet, and teacher of History and African History. He is the author of many poetry books. He is the Best of Net Nominee.