Art by Susan Wilkinson
The Waiting Room
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
It was the wind that arrived on time
and rasped on my door with a soft song,
after I waited for eternity to come.
I waited for news from the stand of the sky;
every leaf, every tree and every flower
has become fortune’s messenger
whose whispering and singing
struck me up from my deep reverie.
A crisis of coming and going,
a conflict of bodies, spirits and gods,
clashed between expectation and reality
batting their eyelids at my closed door.
How often passers-by poked their eyelashes
through the yawning keyholes on the wall,
trying to reassure me of the inevitability of joy,
after they lifted me ten times with their fingernails
and thrashed me on the wet, glass floor.
They, too, had unfulfilled desires,
serial quests in all the wrong places.
What is my portion in the corridor of blessings
after the Lord has filled my house with honey
and I must sit like a toy in the waiting room
for the bees to take up their mats and leave?
I have decided not to hear the sound of music
and the buzz of bullying mosquitoes and flies,
the crack of spiders and the hiss of snakes;
but the footfalls of love returned in gladness.
Even before my door creaked open like a day,
I have known that my eagle reward,
like the distant scent of refreshing water
rushed through the pleated strait of rocks
to bounce on my chest like a violent wind.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
It was the wind that arrived on time
and rasped on my door with a soft song,
after I waited for eternity to come.
I waited for news from the stand of the sky;
every leaf, every tree and every flower
has become fortune’s messenger
whose whispering and singing
struck me up from my deep reverie.
A crisis of coming and going,
a conflict of bodies, spirits and gods,
clashed between expectation and reality
batting their eyelids at my closed door.
How often passers-by poked their eyelashes
through the yawning keyholes on the wall,
trying to reassure me of the inevitability of joy,
after they lifted me ten times with their fingernails
and thrashed me on the wet, glass floor.
They, too, had unfulfilled desires,
serial quests in all the wrong places.
What is my portion in the corridor of blessings
after the Lord has filled my house with honey
and I must sit like a toy in the waiting room
for the bees to take up their mats and leave?
I have decided not to hear the sound of music
and the buzz of bullying mosquitoes and flies,
the crack of spiders and the hiss of snakes;
but the footfalls of love returned in gladness.
Even before my door creaked open like a day,
I have known that my eagle reward,
like the distant scent of refreshing water
rushed through the pleated strait of rocks
to bounce on my chest like a violent wind.