For Chinwe and Other Poems – Poetry by Nigerian Writer, John Chinaka Onyeche

For Madam Chinwe (24th Feb 2026)

Can we be present
for our own absence?

Chinwe, what’s the meaning of a name—
a shadow, a currency devalued
by the rising sun.

Our breath—where it went to is still sought here.
But the vault is empty.
The exchange is closed.

Many times we have slipped its mind;
Many times it has rehearsed our names.
Always, we rose—until this morning,
When we could not.

The Weight of What Happened Here

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
              – William Faulkner

If this land had a spine,
Would it bend or break
To hold the weight of what happened here?

If these streets had a voice,
Would it whisper or roar
The names we have forgotten to say?

If our bones were the ink,
And our skin the parchment,
Who would dare to speak our names?

We are architects of amnesia,
Hammering nails into the echoes
So we cannot hear
What the walls still remember.

My Father’s Son And The Bees

I am the boy my father prayed to be,
the son his own father never stayed to see—
the one who fled when death drew lines
between two communities, as if a border could contain it.
He wanted me found in everything he did,
even when his own safety was a fragile guess,
and mine, a hope he couldn’t name.
When I think of him I see a man
who missed his own childhood and missed his children,
who wanted, perhaps, to be held
as he held us.
Once, I watched him. We went to gather wood
in a farmstead, not knowing the dry grass
had become a school for a swarm.
At his first cut, they rose.
They came for him stinging,
leaving him more dead than alive—
more like a child needing care
than the man who gave it.
And I still wonder:
how much emptiness did he carry,
how much silence,
until the day he was taken from us?