Synkroniciti is stoked to welcome back our final Featured Artist for Audacity, poet Jonathan Chibuike Ukah. Jonathan made his debut with us in Belonging, returning for Recovery and Dreams. With “My Mother Called Me Sand,” he offers a piece that moves with the quiet force of origin myth and the ache of inherited memory. Ukah’s work often explores the porous boundary between the living and the ancestral, and here he meditates on identity shaped not only by a mother’s audacious love and tenacity, but by hunger, war, and the elemental materials of the earth.
“The day my mother breathed into me/ like God, the day He created me,/ I closed my eyes, while she touched my head./ I am air, but you are sand, like gravel on the ground,/ the dust of the kitchen, the mud in the fields,/ the sand in my farm, the garden the beaches;/ but I am air and I breathe into you to have life.”
As a girl approaching adulthood, Jonathan’s mother ate sand, scavenging for crumbs mixed with grit in a cocoa plantation. He embraces this inheritance and his identity as sand, not as something lowly, but as something generative. Sand forms mountains, shorelines, pathways. Sand receives the bodies of the dead. It is the quiet architecture of the world. Jonathan’s lineage is full of resilience, drawing strength from a material that remembers everything and fears nothing. He treats the body as a living archive of that lineage.
Ukah’s poetic technique deepens this elemental vision. His poems are measured, rhythmic, and intimate, built from long, unhurried lines that mimic the cadence of recollection. He writes with the clarity of someone speaking across generations, allowing moments of directness to collapse the distance between speaker and reader. His voice carries the imprint of oral tradition—steady, patient, and resonant—so that even the simplest images feel mythic. In his hands, a kitchen becomes a cosmology, a mother’s breath becomes a creation story, and sand becomes both inheritance and destiny.
This poem is a vessel for ancestral breath, reminding us that identity is not merely inherited; it is transmuted through suffering, love, and the breath of those who came before us, especially our mothers.
Read “My Mother Called Me Sand” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Unleash Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023 and was the Editor’s Choice Prize Winner of Unleash Lit in 2024. He was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize 2024 and the Second Poetry Prize Winner of The Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024.