All I Ever Wanted to Be
Poetry by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
While I was still in my mother's womb,
I dreamt that I grew taller than the sky,
from where I harnessed rain in my palms;
I stared down and saw dryness scattered
upon the ground like flakes of fallen leaves,
prostrated logs of dry wood, broken twigs,
valleys of dry bones, forests without trees,
mountains without sand and pebbles,
where snakes stretched out their heads,
ensnaring the beautiful and the virtuous.
I dreamt that I was the moon, the stars,
holding the clouds in my palms like glass,
ready to smash them on the crusted earth
if the sins of man became unbearable.
I saw carcinogens, germs, enzymes, bacteria,
the fungi of the body, corrosive and abrasive,
all that would kill the breath like an armed moon.
I wanted fire to live within my bones,
and my passion for killing these carcinogens
stayed eternal like the hovering of the rainbow.
To what shall I compare these things?
after I had received songs of living from the sky,
to halt banging like saltwater, acid, embers,
and follow the wind's trails to cleanse the air.
How often I pined for what I wanted to be,
but time, circumstances and misery
mulled my memories into null and void;
how often I regret those crass moments of my life
that I caused the air to grow blades and teeth,
and the wind to sharpen and multiply its claws.
I rose in the morning, angry like morning dew
that splashes fury on housetops and leaves,
after the groaning sun had swept past me,
and the moon stitched the clouds together.
I wanted to be the sky that kidnaps the stars
to pay ransom for the liberation of the clouds,
or the rain that fills up the sky with blocks of air,
rendering it too wet to prepare dinner for the storm.
If I grow sharp tongues like a mad wintry storm,
I would be able to pierce lightning asunder,
and ditch the cancerous ire of a blind thunder
that cracked my desire into smithereens.
Yet, after all these things, I felt strange and sick,
that all I wanted to be was a vessel for the dying.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah’s poems have been featured in Propel Magazine, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Atticus Review, Tab: The Magazine of Poetry and Poetics, The Silk Literary Magazine Sublimation and elsewhere. He won the Poet of the Month Award for December-January 2025 of the Literary Shark Magazine 2025, and was the third winner of the Poetry Contest of The Hemlock Magazine in 2025, the Editor’s Choice of Panoply Zine in 2024, the Second Poetry Prize Winner of Streetlight Literary Magazine in 2024. He was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize in 2024.
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