Life is a Grave – Poem by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
A poem of contrasts—between a mother’s piercing brilliance and a father’s enduring dusk.
In Life is a Grave by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah, a mother blazes with piercing brilliance while a father endures like lingering dusk, a portrait of love, fear, and survival.
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My mother's smile was a bright light sparkling from the corners of a dark window, the piercing brightness of a bullet flying towards me through the alley to where I brought down whatever irked my heart How often I trembled before the shining. My father was like the dusk of a sunny evening, never learned how to go down when a day ended, but sublime in its survival, subtle in its evocation, reluctant to the brilliance of a man who would not let time pass joy away? My best day was like an ocean of sunshine, a fresh field of stars and flowers, surrounded by flames, not flowers, a body of fire, mountains as cords whose stakes were steams of steel forming a stronghold of fear and terror. I watch my bliss go down in the grave, and I am wondering if I was born the absolution of darkness, where the life I live is inside a grave yet I keep hitting the roof of the coffin, screaming, let me out! Let me out! Everything I love returns to ash, everything I touch breaks in my hands; when I need life, death cradles me; the witness of my light is darkness, but here’s a flower that smells of dying opening its arms to embrace the sky.
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✍️ About the Authors
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah lives in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Lucky Jefferson Literary Magazine, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023.
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