Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Unleash Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2022 and the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. His first poetry collection, Blame the Gods, published by Kingsman Quarterly in 2023 and was a finalist at the Black Diaspora 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.
                                           A Touch of Chrysanthemum

Armed with nothing except my nakedness,
I dashed into the field of Chrysanthemums,
and hid behind the lonely Udala tree,
whose leaves raised an umbrella over the forest,
and its bark magnetised the bullets
foraging into the forest like angry wasps.
I carry the sky to cover my head,
but slump into the swamp of chrysanthemums,
sucked the scent lulling me into partial Anaesthesia
and saved me from the stabbing of bullets.
How the birds shrieked like frogs at night,
the shadows dazed me with a million eyes,
and the soldiers crawled like snakes in the dark.
But I heard Aurora’s gong in the distance
and the leaves mime their welcome of dawn.





The Joy of the Dead

There was silence on the train this morning,
no stirring of feet, no waving of hands,
hunched bodies lay still and motionless,
like a cluster of crooked wood in a coffin,
as though someone poured a bucket of cold water
on a crowd of burning parrots,
a horde of sparkling diamonds in flames,
and stillness descended on them like a net.
If that's how my mother thought of death,
there must be an error somewhere,
when my father said that the dead could hear us
when we speak ill of their past lives.
I have lived with this fear all my life,
believing in the peace and silence of the dead,
but if they tremble in their graves with grief,
what joy is there to die then?
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