The man held an umbrella over his head,

like he held darkness from crashing into light.

A sartorial suit sold in Soho,

an Obama shirt, a Trump rain jacket,

Che Guevara’s moustache,

Fidel Castro’s pipe, Abacha’s sunglasses,

Kim Jong-un’s shoes and Clinton’s smile.

The man walked like Armstrong on Mars,

as though all of the ground was wool.

How the clouds had descended on earth,

made the floor of every garden fluffy,

chastened the rough places,

patched up the crooked landscape,

that he who was the next thing to an angel,

would go with no broken bones,

or blistered toes, or bloody eyes.

His blessed hands had pulled down the lift;

his tender, socked feet matched on a white terrace,

smeared it with the blood of the nine-year-old.

He married her with full rites and rights.

But it was his hands that touched off this inferno,

by which he fondled two breasts in passing,

though his innocence glowed from his collar,

shouting, it’s better to die of passion than of boredom.

He was a devout believer;

prayed seven times a day,

even as he walked on the tapestry of the sky,

the red carpet which Heaven laid out,

for those who would ascend at the rapture.

Watch the umbrella! Watch the umbrella!

with a nipple like a virgin’s.

Who would blame him for touching it?

It’s like caressing the pages of his holy book.

And as he went home that rainy day,

the night was too virile a consolation,

from a day woven with the linen of fear,

when he would tear off these garments,

lay beside the limp body of his wife,

and closed his blessed eyes and mouth.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

(Image is of a statue near Ivy Green Cemetery, Charleston, WA)

As I voice out these words,

I remember that my father had three voices,

the voice he used for my mother,

the voice he used in speaking to us,

and the voice he used for his kinsmen.

He had no voice for himself and his god,

though he said that he would have time,

to speak to himself and to his god when he died.

I can imagine my father mumbling to his god,

when he’s on his way to his ancestors,

blaming him for the way he was cast upon the sand.

What else would he be doing with his fellow dead,

if not, making them get used to his new voice?

The grave would echo his loud, lone voice,

when he blasted his dreams and tantrums

through the waves and storms of the grave.

He said that he would return once or twice,

but there would be no thrice.

I wondered if he dismissed his full resurrection

that deals with three comings to bear fruit,

or whether he would start creating sequences

which no one had ever seen or heard before.

The voice my mother heard from my father,

was the cradling of a flower during a flame,

something that began with tongues of yellow fire,

and it was the hammer, death nails on wood,

or the voice that fell the oak that dried in summer;

the same voice commanded wealth with a guitar,

singing to his ancestors the pain of his lingering,

when, with one deadly blow, time lashes out at him.

How often I tried to speak to my mother like my father,

with the voice of a man tormenting spirits asleep,

but she stirred as a queen roused to fury,

and ordered me to await my time to grow,

when time itself runs out of things to say

to a man whose moment of victory has come.

Sometimes, my mother forgets that we were there,

while she waited to hear my father’s voice,

calling her from behind the bedroom curtain,

to hurry up, as the night is far and deeply spent.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

(Image is of an allegedly genuine totem pole found in front of a great bakery in Manette, WA)

God! All the girls say I’m Jerusalem,

surrounded by gigantic mountains;

some say I’m nature’s poor patchwork

and I’m not beginning to show leakage.

There’s no trembling in the sky,

there’s no falling of the clouds;

my defences are rigid and stone solid

and I have not ceased to be a lightless night,

or a field of flowers littered with corpses.

I embrace the night like it is day,

though I see what jewels lie on the ground,

sparkling, illuminating dark objects between.

Like my head sticks within the clouds,

and I have no way of turning right and left,

but stranded between the earth and the stars,

I hang my neck where the noose is strong.

I’m now in a house with a thousand doors,

Yet, I lock each room in my blood.

But you picked up this secret flame

burning like a distant scent of rushing water;

led by a spirit you cannot comprehend,

you arrive with hesitation at my door, knocking.

Now, I stand before you naked,

a man in love, in epileptic surrender,

a man who cannot speak or hear;

a man who was not blind from birth;

but wander without eyes except your light.

I am challenged and paralysed,

I am physically disabled and displaced

dead to everything around me.

Like a bone lying carelessly on a garden floor,

I pant for water, air and nutrients,

not knowing how to return to my former life,

but knowing only the outlines of your heart

that feeds me like water, air and nutrients,

and not cast me away like a rejected prodigal,

but wash me in popsicles, wrap me in joy.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

(Image is of a “orgone pyramid” on top of one of Leila’s many book cases)

(We are pleased to welcome the readers to five full days of Jonathan Chibuike Ukah–The Eds.)

When I grew old and bold enough to understand

the difference between the laughter of the forests

and the grinning of the flowers of our garden,

my father showed me the stone of his forefathers.

His great-grandfather hewed it from an ancient rock

which built the stalagmite walls of the Woku River,

where the young women of my village fetched water

when drought possessed the land like the night;

or famine ate the fields like a band of locusts.

My father told me that the sea that overflowed

in the Harmattan during the anger of the moon,

or the River Niger that surged beyond its banks,

had swept over the rock a thousand times a day

and rendered it wrinkled, rough and cracked.

My grandmother planted flowers around it,

and dug up the ruin in its base with tenderness,

that though the wind ceased near our compound,

the stone had enough air to breathe and live.

On the surface of the stone lay names of my forefathers

whose wives and mothers tended to the stone

and preserved its hardness and longevity till now,

that time would not erode its beauty and strength,

standing as a bond between the past and the present.

He told me how crazy the rain had become of late,

that swept over the stone with wild gales and storms,

yet did not wash away the names of my ancestors,

that stood out in the garden like light on a hill.

It became a scene of dusk and darkness in the sun,

weathered by time, fractured by a cruel touch,

the stone lay on the ground like an old carcass.

I asked my father about my mother’s name,

which the stone did not display to the town.

“Your mother did not clean the stone till her death,

and now it stooped not to bloom again at her time.”

My eldest sister said mother killed the old stone

after father sprinkled the blood of a goat on it,

as an annual sacrifice to the gods of the land,

that we might have life and have it abundantly.

Even stones wilt, whittle, decay and die away

if care, love and affection pass them by.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

(Image of a winged friend perched on a stone in the Manette district of Bremerton, WA, USA-Leila)

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom.His poems have been featured in Propel Magazine, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Atticus Review, Tab: The Magazine of Poetry and Poetics, The Silk Literary Magazine Sublimation and elsewhere. Jonathan won the Poet of the Month Award for December-January 2025 of the Literary Shark Magazine 2025, and was the third winner of the Poetry Contest of The Hemlock Magazine in 2025, the Editor’s Choice of Panoply Zine in 2024, and the Second Poetry Prize Winner of Streetlight Literary Magazine in 2024. He was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize in 2024.