A Good Friday Agreement
We agreed this misty morning that no one should die this year, that we shall live to see winter and summer, autumn, spring and the following years, our life rolling on the hard crust like a devil’s ball, On and On and On, ab initio; a beautiful thing crawling like a purple butterfly crawling on the dust, morphing into sand; an endless cyclone, surprising in its silence and potency of overcoming decay. We have measured the breadth of our hearts, to ensure it would withstand the whip of the wind; a recluse of time, a basket of pain escaping the cunning clutches of heaviness, trying to gorge out our bodies for a fall. We will stand on the top of this mountain to proclaim how we have decreed death away by twisting desire and despair out of our souls, ensuring that we no longer eat the food of flesh, but abolish hunger, banish thirst, and abstain from every temptation to spin our heads into something lived in pleasure. Now that we have signed away our death, is immortality the thing that picks us up?
*****
My Body is a Museum
I should have known that mosquitoes have so much blood when I splashed them against my body. Air has never fallen on my lungs the way cockroaches drop their wings at the breath or touch of a body, mired in such a deep silence that their dying breath is a song. My knees fall to the ground not for the prayer I wanted to shout but when the burden drags me down, there is nothing like a casting down. I pleaded with the moon to come down and sweep away my blues with a broom and brush off these dead skin bogging me towards the open grave, if I must ascend to the sky with light as clear as Heaven without the clouds. I don't think you should blame me for dropping my cross on the ground, it’s all the lifting up I needed to flush out the rubble of my body. Hence, these flowers spring up, the daisies falling, the cacti collapsing, lilies coughing out dead roots, and ants crawling from every pore. When roses arrive with blood hands, they watch the moon hang its arms against the parapet of the sun. No more will my body wither without water, nor my eyes grow wet without wind, but the vicissitudes of grace will follow me when spiders crawl in to mock my ruin. I donated my living body to God, and all you can see are pews and altars, strongholds like crossroads and a psalm.
About the Poet:
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Unleash Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the third Prize in the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2024 and the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. His second collection, I Blame My Ancestors, published by Kingsman Quarterly in July 2024 was a Second runner-up at the Black Diaspora Poetry Slam in 2024. 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 was the Second Poetry Prize Winner at the Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024.