Gone For A While Poem by Tony-Cemaluk Egbuonu

Continue your whisperings in hushed voices;
I did and did not want to hear right,
Or ask questions or request clarifications.
Lest the mother would overhear the ultimate answer;
The ultimate response, and pack up and go.

Wished she should not, and whenever she does,
Know of this to stay;
This total eclipse, of the moon and of the sun and of the stars,
Till everything that stood still would stir,
Cease to be static and start to move.

It could turn out a dream or a drama if,
Though, I were a somnambulist and he was an actor.
But a bus came carrying a casket.
Tears, not unlike boiled water for tea, flowed,
As fuelled flood from raging rain storm;
That, likewise, couldn't be controlled
Till the storm stopped.

I cared the less that the tears like flood would soon run out and dry.
Who is in there, by the way?
Chai, Chekwube-Chukwu, my dear lone brother was in there.

Be brave and blunt but not brutal to tell me what happened to you.
As you can see, I have run out of tears;
No more tears to shed, and the present choking tremor,
Like earthquake, will soon pass away.

Intraperitoneal haemorrhage consequent to ruptured hepatic organ.
My dear brother, sorrow less and bear with me.

I did not mean to come and go and leave you to come and go about brotherless.
I never left home to go from long vacation to eternal holiday
And leave my mother and well-wishers weeping and wailing like this.

Imagine, I was a victim without emergency attention
But received accelerated autopsy, and prompt deposition into the morgue.

Please, brother, bear with me;
Remember that I was the last, and it oughtn't be my turn and time
To taste this if not for what happened in far-away Lagos;
As I was on my way and lane walking far away from traffic,
I was struck by a truck.

Talk not about my painful passage.
Tell it not to my peers and pals that I'm no more; that I've gone.
Don't ever ask me, 'Where to? '
For I'm not really gone.

So, sleep but don't sleep to slumber and snore
As not to see signs of my coming home but not like this;
For as I left so soon, so shall I surface soon to stay with you.

Trust this to terminate the tremor till then?
Yes, it did.
As your name, Chekwube-Chukwu, Trust God, I trusted, and it manifested;
Bounced back after a while.