Jonathan Ukah
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in, TABs The Journal of Arts and Poetics, Unleash Lit, The
Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and
elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. 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 the Second Poetry Prize Winner of The Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024.​
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THEN I COME AND GO​
Forgive my ignorance when I come, forgetting my duty to go,
it's the onus of a visitor to think of going before he thinks of coming.
But it’s only the heap of ruins which the war stacked on my face
like the march of heavy boots on a German floor, with gunshots
striking the air with fire, and digging holes that open like graves.
The burning is a festival of disaster that transforms me into a
body riddled with sores. It reminds me of a soldier relative
who returned from the war in a grey sack. Nothing else pointed to
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his body except for the thousand bullet wounds in his chest. Now
I know that God’s grace sent you to preserve me from the earthquake
looming upon the bright and sunny day. I have no other explanation
for your coming, though I didn’t consult my dreams for autopsy.
I was limping through the day with blindness after bullets ripped
my eyes out; all I could see was the darkness in my mind, that replaced
the beating of my soul. It was in blindness I saw better, but times
changed and my body is the same, a fracture in time without time,
a silence more murderous than silence. Each step I took was
a copious hill, each movement was a sample of a mountain, which
baptised me like a valley, swallowing my birth when death is
far from me, which grew on my head like mushrooms, bags of stones
smashed from the sky to replace the teeth of my youth. I
was wondering what it would be when I walked into the wilderness,
without the attention of the wilderness, or when I dip my
feet into the sea, yet the sea behaves as if nothing happens; but
you arrived, and the wilderness was an ocean, the gods
squirmed in frustration. It was you who created a new universe for me
where I spread out my dreams like fresh flowers. Where
I can come and go,
go forever.