Not What You Think - Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

To dismiss as though it were nothing,
the scathing, slanting rays of the sun,
or the greyness of the summer sky,
is the beginning of the end of beauty,
or whatever it is that we hold sacred;
every sickness that takes a man’s soul,
or dims the brilliant light in his heart,
must start with a single bite, a cough,
a feeling of unease, a harmless fly in the eye.
Sometimes, it’s a stitch, a scratch of the skin,
with or without the sumptuous flow of blood,
or the outpouring of secretions;
there will be blood poisoning to the wire
corruption of the jittery nerves, cracking of bones,
the convulsing circulation system, the arteries,
parts of the nervous system, muscles fall
and the whole body of man follows after.
And that’s how a little error collapses a tower,
a careless sentence leads to a bloody war,
a decimation of a people, a genocide.
That’s how a father’s erroneous beginning
marks the brutal end of his intimate family,
his lineage and his budding generation.
That’s how, at the beginning of the war,
my father and I left Port Harcourt in a hurry,
perched on the hard saddles of a bicycle,
but my father was dead when we arrived.
And that’s how I’m the way I am today,
a child of misfortune, a catalyst of my mother,
who, through carelessness clasps one of my eyes
and folds my legs within my body,
but I’m not a slave to fear, or a pole of pity,
a flower of ridicule, laughter and derision,
but I will rise and dream of greatness. 
Though I limp when I walk
or stutter when I speak,
though parts of my body are falling apart,
and the sun sheds blood on my skin,
hey, friend it’s not what you think. 

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.