by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

Once, I hoisted a ladder on my wall,
climbed on it with my hands behind my head,
cocked up to see what the sky needed to offer.
My father shouted from the palm tree,
on which he perched all afternoon,
Stop sneaking into paradise!
Several times he told me,
Paradise is for the dead.
I saw turtles perch on his lips,
when he said that not all death was for paradise;
some were damnation of the soul,
like unleashing a horde of termites into a nose,
or slicing the heart into hard slabs.
Sometimes the dead have no talent,
to make eternity a better resting place.
Fearing that I would die to dissolve paradise at my back,
I implored my father to lift me over,
where thunderstorms mumble like Gemini,
And the ocean was flying away like a bird in love;
there, every stone would be a cake,
and every bird would turn into a flower.
There, I would know how to stand a million years,
writing the poems I never had time to write. 
How brave would it be to have a paradise for the living?
when death comes like a crawling insect across the field,
when the dead cannot perceive the stench of life,
and the weight of paradise falls upon the living?
Just as my mother said, we crawl into graves
dug for those who would avoid paradise,
as though every crawling thing is dead.
How can paradise be for the dead, 
when the living labour till they drop?
How can death be the seed to germinate a paradise
when its fruit is violence, its leaves are despair?
The seed germinates, the fruit blooms,
and death is too ugly to inherit paradise.
Most important is the manner of dying.
To die clutching a pumpkin to the chest
is the luxury of bidding paradise farewell.
A man who drowns has too much water in his blood;
does he intend to cause a flood in paradise?
To die kissing a woman, as my friend did,
is to sneak into paradise through a back door,
what a risk and a danger to the thousand virgins.
Let’s not talk about those who die in their sleep,
they are either facing the ceiling or the floor,
the fangs of sleep would never leave them behind.

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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. He was the Editor’s Choice Prize Winner of Unleash Lit in 2024, the Second Poetry Prize Winner at the Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024 and Winner of the Poet of the Month December-January 2025 at the Literary Shark Poetry Contest.