May 8~ JONATHAN CHIBUIKE UKAH

Hello and happy Friday, poetry lovers. Today at SHINE, it's a pleasure to share the work of UK-based poet, Jonathan Chibuike Ukah. Please enjoy his imagistic poem, "My Mother's Food." Thank you, Chibuike, for sharing your work with the SHINE international poetry community!

My Mother's Food

My mother was a thousand years old today;
she lived long and young until she dropped,
growing like a palm tree planted by the sea,
like a coconut tree groomed by the mountain.
She quickly reminded those with long beards
that grow hair on the jaw and everywhere else
that there is a secret to longevity if we wanted to hear.
When she was ten years old, she looked like five;
at the age of twenty, she passed for a ten-year-old.
At thirty, my mother seemed fifteen,
though she graduated from the university and had my sister.
Now, she and Celestina could pass for sisters,
the envy of the young men for whom charm was electric.
My mother had always eaten whatever she wanted,
not what her mother cooked nor what was possible.
She grew up in a village known for mushrooms;
it did not help her eat vegetables or fruit
or fix her mind and body on delicacies,
but on those things that captured her imagination.
In the secret of the night, when everyone was in bed,
my mother sneaked out into the pond to look for snakes.
She would capture a live snake and cut off its throat,
and before anyone approached, she ate it in a jiffy.
She neither cooked it on fire nor warmed it in a microwave;
she did not roast it in an air fryer or fry it like termites,
as my elder sister fried millipedes during the war.
Among her few remaining pleasures was her obsession
for places damp and lonely, dark and sombre,
where no sane man would go, no animal would hide,
but such were the hideouts of vipers and pythons,
which awaited my mother’s nocturnal visitations.
Whenever she arrived, she dangled a little lizard,
and danced like the snake worshippers of Nembe,
who wore green leaves as eyelashes and asparagus as earrings,
who celebrated the Year of the Snake as their birthday.
When the vipers crooned their curved necks in a coma,
accepting my mother’s worship as coming from the heart,
she leaned forward for a kiss, her knife inside her mouth.
How she sliced the throats of these snakes is a mystery,
but such is the grace of a woman whose beauty was no barrier
to murder the innocent, whose blood she drank for eternity.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom. His 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. Literary achievements include:  the Poet of the Month Award for December 2024-January 2025 from Literary Shark Magazine; third-place winner of The Hemlock Magazine Poetry Contest (2025); and the Pierian’s Alexander Pope Poetry Award 2025.

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