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When love engulfed your soul & Other Poems | John Chinaka Onyeche

               When Love Engulfed Your Soul

I walked through the memory lanes yesterday and arrived at the day I first touched your palms, just like the Moon touches the face of the firmament and whispers coolness as its arrival. I was kinda in an apparition to glare at your sun brilliance eyes; they spoke in a language of gleeful adores and when you did open your mouth and let out a smile. I walked the old walkway we walk to know what paradise is embedded in your bosom and so I found the lost kingdom of my life and daily, I have come to worship at your altar as a husbandman. In the lane of this memory, I have been walking to see it to fruition as every seedling grows in unison one after another, an embodiment of beauty you have become to me. Shall I not liken you to the Cedar of Lebanon which bears its fruits in and out of the season, oh, come to me my woman and my everything.

               We Returned To Kiss The Cross

Out of the knickknack of this year,

We have quickly run our hands on things,

Those imaginable to the men of this world,

The knitting of the strongest tangles

The struggle, the hustle and bustle

We look at the face of this life

Just like as one looks at the cross.

We made our way to the ladder of life,

Climbing each step of it with wills

At a pace not haste but slowly steadily

Life of this end is metamorphosis

Through the windows of every opportunity

Heading upward out from the tunnels

Life never stopped ringing its bells

Jingling wangling up and down we go

But daily at the cross, we returned to kiss.

We kiss away from the scars life engraved

On us as life’s sojourners, east, south we go

Life is a gift and the struggle a race for all

If life knocks at you like the stormy wind,

Know this, life is the freedom to choose from

Life is a fruity landscape we must plant on

A seed today, a giant oak tree tomorrow

And we returned to kiss the cross each day.

               My Father And the Last Train

When the last caravan left the terminal last night, it echoed miseries as I was awoken from my many slumbers of that which I had once called family life. And in this poem, my father was a hunter and he hunted down good games. And my mother, a farmer who gave birth to a Daughter who mends fabrics and never tried to mend anyone’s, broken heart. A Son who writes poetry and plants trees from where he writes on dead trees. And a nephew, one who kneels before the Sacrament, an image of a man with a cross and recites the prayer beads around his neck every morning whispering; amen and amen as a ritual for the family. No doubt, this was the setting of our home in the middle of the train station where every travelling traveller travels through; dead or alive the station, the hands that bear the legs on which the gruelling wheels kneels to say their last prayers on never-ending, going to bed as it cries all night and day alike. For last night, my father’s hands had hovered around the last train at the station which was heading to the new wood-world where only the dead trees live to retell(s) of life’s last memories in this world. I mean, where only in the body of dead woods are memories written by a poet and his Son one amongst them who writes poetry on dead trees of times and memories of men on this world writes about his father and the last train heading to the new wood-world of no returns.

Photo by Ankush Minda on Unsplash


About the Writer: John Chinaka Onyeche “Rememberajc” (he/his) is the author of; Echoes Across The Atlantic, a husband, father and poet from Nigeria. He writes from the city of Port Harcourt Rivers State, Nigeria. He is currently a student of History and Diplomatic Studies at Ignatius Ajuru University Of Education Port Harcourt Rivers State. John Chinaka can be reached through the following means:

Facebook.com/jehovahisgood
Published inPoetry&Musings

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