The Pain of the Pangolin – Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
Now, the election is over, the party begins,
the voters are drinking to victory;
they are toasting to defeat and a new tomorrow;
the leaders applaud themselves with bare fists;
the contestants are hopeful like the sun;
they have smashed the hurdle of rising clouds;
down the road, the thugs are fighting, snarling,
wielding sticks, knives, guns and broken bottles,
they are shouting at the moon for raw meat,
and at the sun for more, bitter bread;
while our fathers, whose drivel we inherited,
plan for us to die for their unforgivable sins.
They are blocking the sun with their palms,
so that darkness can roam freely.
Now, the dire election is finally over,
I see the fractured rain limping down,
the threat of thunder and lightning;
the broken siren and moaning of violence
march through our empty streets at midnight;
hear the loud, roaring motor of commotion
drowning the senses of hearing and seeing;
telephone calls rage over the tumbling waves;
busy lines derange in a crowded transit;
immoral offers leave the contestants’ lips
and rush to the vulnerable and the gullible,
those who have discovered love in pink papers,
those who are carrying a wide, black duvet
to cover and block the face of the moon.
Everywhere there is the struggle of a generation,
to straighten the wrinkles of our fathers’ brows,
cart away their dung and seal their cracks,
which they dropped carelessly around;
our fathers swallowed carcasses, trafficked bigotry,
and it's our destiny to cast them out of our hearts;
to widen the road to our redemption,
to accelerate our liberation, our deliverance
from a fate so ignominiously downtrodden.
And we have come up with a new story,
that the sun must shine, rain must fall,
the face of the sky must stay clear and unbroken;
darkness will fall only at the end of the day,
not forced to wear a mask to envelop the light,
but to be the forerunner of the day, the cute announcer.
We have come with the mark of the star on our foreheads,
what our fathers carved in our childhood,
but covered with their enlarged hands when we grew up;
we have come with our bodies hedged between sobs,
our teeth set on edge, clattering silently in the dark
set to dispel and cancel our dangerous education,
rearrange our disjointed teeth, seal them with rings,
though we carry with love the chisel to smoothen them;
we have come to make this land more beautiful,
we, the dull and lazy ones, toying around with our phones,
glued to the pages of social media, parasites of our parents,
strangers to the state that see us as the lakes of laughter,
that wishes this rain never to end but drip down into our pants,
into our bedrooms and kitchens where roses huddle,
and lilies flaunt their teetered leaves in the hot galaxy.
We have not received the mandate to fight and die,
to weep over our dying parents, our bleeding past,
over the death of dreams, the drought on our shores,
to weep and sob for past terrors and serial havoc,
to make history lame or memory worthless;
to bury our children before they are born or dead,
and wonder why our fathers toyed with our dreams.
It is the only mandate we have received,
the empowerment to embody clarity of vision,
never to swim in the same muddied lake
that blinded our parents, crippled our forefathers;
the mandate to make a furnace of hope and cheer,
marking the difference between yesterday and tomorrow,
and make a sacrifice with the eggs of the eagle,
so that our grasses will sing again, our fields glow;
our trees will blossom and bear purple fruits,
our young ones will bloom like flowers in spring,
our mothers will be fruitful even after years of drought,
and groom their daughters to overcome body death;
we have not received the mandate to raise a mountain,
to build up hills and decorate them with thorns and mines,
but the power to build ladders wherever mountains rise,
bridges where rivers separate us from our goals,
and bring down all hills so that our children drink water,
and lie beneath the intense scrutiny of the sky.
It's the only mandate we are worthy to give,
the authority we are permitted to receive.
We were wailing because chickens bit our children,
now lizards grow new teeth armed with money;
For some reason, we keep on walking
blindly through this lake of lilac ice
into which we have fallen a thousand times;
I thought we had left this island of horror,
followed the glimmer of light piercing our thoughts;
we had denounced the humiliation and degradation
which was the machinery of our gory past.
I thought we went through the months of winter chill,
survived the deadly frost and the morning ice sleet;
I thought we waded through the smouldering furnace,
emerging at the other side of the spectrum
ripe for the journey into the realm of light,
where excessive joy would not be as deadly as pain,
and happiness, like an electrical circuit,
cursing through the thinnest strings of our intestines.
We were on our way to welcome the truth of tomorrow,
and overcome the bitter falsehoods of yesterday;
I thought we were hurrying towards the noble path,
where we would give sparrows fitting wings
and lily’s golden petals occupy the sky;
nuts for rodents and squirrels, grass for the goats;
fill the wilderness of our hearts and souls
with the freshest still water distilled from love;
once, we cradled our dreams with the softness of reality,
made love in the hope of achieving great things;
we spoke of our hearts in the air while we smiled,
throwing our hands up to the sky in search of an anchor;
lost, I thought we were beginning to feel our pulse
with which to grope our way out of this darkness.
Once again, we find ourselves at a crossroads
with an inordinate zeal to assassinate the gentle.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah lives in the United Kingdom with his family. His poems have been published and will soon be published in Strange Horizons, Atticus Review, The Cortland Review, Space and Time Magazine, The Pierian and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest 2022 and a finalist of the African Diaspora Award 2023. He has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
