(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.
(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.
Saragun Springs 