Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

We are all of grass.
Unlike our dreams that come like stones,
fermented, we turned them into wine—
into the drink of those who live in the air,
of those who die in the flesh with flowers.
Our bodies are a conundrum of life and death,
that grow and die, eat and starve,
in a howling hunger, screaming through stillness,
like a piece of bread—
flat bread, brown bread, white bread,
broken, blessed and shared out
to the hungry, the famished, the starving,
even to those who survive dreadful wars in the desert.
This pleasure is not an illusion,
but a sacrament to heal wounds sustained in a war
and wounds inflicted in peacetime.
All pleasure is an illusion,
as though life is a lectern of pain,
and the fruit of the heart is despair and sorrow, 
with red and white wine, like apple juices,
offered for the blood of the lamb.
Eat and drink, you’re whole,
purified, sanctified, cleansed and holy,
I have nourished my body for the feeding of the masses,
like feeding the four and five thousand,
the multitudinous congregation of ants,
without a claim for holiness and miracles.
The things we eat make our bodies sacramental.
When will an ant and an elephant be justified,
that righteousness may spread to beasts,
though my back bones become dung?
Righteousness is like the Victoria Falls,
fresh, spring water from my fermented body;
wood carving, swamp of grass,
leaves littering in a morass of water.
I will not make the insect holy.
Though my body resurrects into winter,
Or summer intervenes in the run of things.
I know when to keep moving,
that the sacrament may yield fruit.
When the harvest season returns,
like a wave returning to the same venue,
I will listen to the voices of the dead,
telling me to reform my ways.
My body will yawn itself into an amendment,
wrap itself in a cake of gold,
and whoever eats what is holy,
may neither hunger nor thirst again.