Chima Ononogbu Poems

Oh you South Africans, the black natives!
You once bled the blood of apartheid,
Drank the rage of renegades traversing your mountains,
You rebuked your humanity that you may calm their vexed eyes.
...

That night, in a dream,
I found myself on a hill's skull
overlooking a quiet, dimly remembered, hamlet
hemmed by untrod expanse of sprightly vegetation
...

We're mere sojourners in life's great plains,
which they say isn't a bed of roses;
therefore I surmise it's a bed of thorns,
because life is either one or the other.
...

In those earliest happy days,
when life at its freshest,
a spirited lad I really was; so innocent, so angelic maybe,
always in my father's loving arms cradled,
...

In my search, the sage told me:
When rails sparkle their brightest,
The stars in my abode shall descend,
And pleasant air the sacred oak shall blow,
...

Why should anyone die?
Why, therefore, death? Leaving this life and going
to the abode whereby souls grow deaf, more deaf
than a tree that runs not, even when a saw yells death from afar.
...

Oppression everywhere; people scurrying,
scurrying away from a lunatic,
a dragon-mouthed lunatic drunk from a cocktail of blood.
No one is safe;
...

I'm a dove with a face of a hulk,
But you think wrong of me!

You think of me a little too cocky, contumacious;
...

And yes, I know, really well,
that life is a bridge between quicksand and deep sea.

I know its temperament like I know the face of the moon.
...

In the sky
Lies my dream,
Where among the stars,
It watches and beckons on me.
...