Dad is Still Fighting
Poetry by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
Every soldier has returned home,
but my father is yet to return.
Our town is alive with soldiers returning,
some with half-lives, others with half a body ;
some in sediment and sacks of sand;
others return in pillars of bullets and gunshots,
like the one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed.
Mother says that some acquire one heart,
as if they were born with a thousand.
That’s father's humour; a man has four lives,
four heads, four eyes, four hearts and four legs,
the four days being the four market days,
Nkwo, Eke, Orie and Afor.
He said that his ancestors married four wives,
and here, he is fighting to keep one.
Sometimes, I wonder if Father has four wives
and has run away from us with one of them.
Mother has four eyes and can see everything,
I believe her when she says my father is still fighting.
The other day, mother is weeping in her bedroom,
wiping away tears with the end of her clothes.
She rushes to cheer me up when she sees me.
Sometimes, she emerges with inflamed eyes;
I think it must be the smoke or the hot ashes
that the wind splashes into her eyes;
or the blast of wild flames from naked stoves.
Our neighbours cook with firewood or gas cookers
and mother is allergic to their smoke.
One cold evening, I see mother hew wood,
but she lets the axe fall beside her feet;
she stares into the distance, beyond the sky.
I can’t tell what holds her captive;
a river rising, a sea, an ocean or a mountain,
the mud on the walls of time, the poto-poto,
a hill too steep to climb, a bridge too wacky to walk on,
the sediment of vapour gathering in her eyes,
the tangle of dead ancestors offering her palm wine,
or the earth accepting everything from ghosts,
with shadows dangle in the distance,
like a man disappearing through the backdoor.
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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