Sweet and Sour

by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

My father hoisted the Biafra flag,
on the lowered hands of a mango tree;
I leapt for joy;
ripples of my jubilation dropped on guava trees,
trickling down to the hibiscus flowers.
I felt the tickling of the magnolias
shedding their leaves to the pebble-littered floor.
Happiness was in everything around me,
in the sun that darkened in the day,
the flood that gathered from rain,
the fire erupting from my sister’s candle,
the coldness of the Harmattan heat
and when an Udala fruit fell like a bomb
digging a grave on our neighbour’s compound.
There was a charm in the small things that breathe,
beautiful or ugly, tall or small.

I turned sixteen, and everything turned sour.
something poisoned my memories,
souring the sweetness of all that I knew
or set them ablaze.
My first growth of tenderness and love
turned its head to the ground,
and I saw the dirt in most beautiful things.
The war came, and my mother wore night on her face,
with a body split like a volcanic ground;
my father returned with a grotesque body
and a bloodstained back, dry face and broken lips.
My sisters dressed like hewers of wood
and drawers of water,
or the pre-war coal miners of Port Harcourt;
rushing to the stream in the morning
but returning with shards of broken pots.
My mother carried hot, black pots of rice
to the one-armed, one-eyed soldiers,
threatening to kill her husband if she failed,
while her neck knicked against her shoulders,
as she tasted blood each time she bit her lips.
She glared at the sky with rainy eyes.
The day we lost Okwudili to Kwashiorkor;
my mother sighed; my father sighed.
Death ran his lines with little effort.

Now, I have arrived at this destination,
I learned not to be David’s grasshopper
that fails desire at each point of my life;
I decided to slaughter a part of me
constantly yearning and yelling for the paradise
which my body had inhabited from birth,
and I have come to relive its existence
in all the things I experience.
In the dark days following the war,
we huddled together in our kitchen,
our hands stretched over the fire,
singing of God’s eternal promises
and the strongholds He prepared for us.
My mother closed her eyes to sniff in the heat
and the light gleaming from the naked flames,
reminding us of the never-failing grace
abundant to those who did not lose hope.
My father stared at the spaces in his eyes,
wondering if love was also a dream-like life.
I licked my lips with scars on my heart,
praying never to wake up to death
as I shuffled one paradise with another.

JONATHAN CHIBUIKE UKAH is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Unleash Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2022 and the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. His first poetry collection, Blame the Gods, published by Kingsman Quarterly in 2023 was finalist at the Black Diaspora 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.