Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

The Year My Wife Arrived

A woman planted a tree in Africa,

in Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda,

as rivers flooded debris into the abyss,

where everything turned green in summer.

The weather forecasters had grim faith in the sun,

and had pronounced the year a deluge,

short of declaring a famine or a disaster.

It was the year the flood killed dreams

and rendered hope homeless and boneless.

A child was born on the top of a palm tree,

so, he decided to stay closer to Heaven.

The year the climate snapped raw,

and tugged at the anguish of the people,

who were remnants of the slices of war,

although some said it had been in the making

long before the sky prepared for the flood.

Some pains have no origin and no end.

We see them occur like secret needles,

roving through the grooves of our life.

My wife arrived for the first time in London,

and it was like we had a date in a distant land,

from a continent where everything took place

after we met face to face for the first time.

I didn't know how to mend my wife’s place,

to know her history and pedigree,

to wipe out the black holes on her cheeks.

I decided to use her body as a tool, a brush

to turn the hour green, the second red,

and invited guts and nerves to strike a deal.

I bought a green toilet seat, a green foot mat;

I painted my toilet sink and bathtub green.

I rushed to Argos and bought a green towel,

and painted my bathroom and toilet green.

My furniture, television sets and house phone

glittered in green like a field in Greenland;

the curtains on my door and windows

swayed and shimmered with green linens.

The shoe rack, side table and the dining table,

all became museums of green grandeur.

My kitchen had green woven into the smoke,

the often-suffocating air of an oven or chimney.

When my wife arrived, I showed her around

like a first lady at a factory inspection.

Was that a bewildered look in her eyes,

as though a shark was devouring her tears?

But she smiled and kissed me on the forehead

after I confessed to her love of green,

and green was the shot on the arm of my baby

who slapped my wrist with indignation,

her painful smile going nowhere beyond

the macabre of a changing climate mood.

I rushed out of my house in the navel of sorrow

when galaxies collided against one another.

I returned from work and preened into my room,

to see everywhere was glittering and snowy.

Nothing green stayed in our flat anymore.

I turned to her with regret in my eyes.

"Climate changed, baby, climate changed!"

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet from the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Ariel Chart Press, Atticus Review, Zoetic Press, Unleash Lit, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere. He won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2022 and The Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. He won the Unleash Creatives’ Editor’s Choice Prize in Poetry in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize in 2024. His poetry collection, Blame the Gods, published by Kingsman Quarterly in 2023, was a finalist at the Black Diaspora Award in 2023, as well as the Grand Winner of the Wingless Dreamer Poetry Prize in 2024.