Parody of Colours & Other Poems – Blessing Ojo

Parody of Colours

The rain licks the hypothetical brown roofs bright,
screens its tongue to the world. I think there has been
a parody of colours here. Or what do you think?
Who first gave brown colours to the roofs?
All the while, it has been a burnt red sun doing
its meek art of remembrance. I look at the rooftops
in Ngoshe & I remember. Men burned & settled
on their roofs. They just wanted to stay at home—
hornbills wedged in the wood. You can set campfire.
Burn truck tires as if we’re in Christmas. Hold a body
to the sky & light it. The soot settles. Even the blood
spilled beckons a gathering the size of a modest market.
Come here, in colours other than black. Come in white,
with bravura. Like seraphs stuffed with songs. Let’s adopt
the image of cherubs mocking death. Come trade grief.
Be kind to give your little sparrow to a bird boy cursed
with a vulture. Because there might be an idiom widening
its fungiform to the soffit, come here with your harp.
This way, we have dressed a city right, in bones & colours.
Like we did in Kirchanga & Garaha where we skinned
a rainbow as seven shades of burnt men hanging in the sky.

Fact-Based Journalism About Grief
after Karisma Price

Grief walks
into my life in
the manner of a ghost.
Quiet & bodiless. There are
countries offering it a body. All their
flags, bloodstained. My grief, a hapless song.
My grief, poets in wordy shrines. They never rest
from spilling blood. I remember you in my minute of agony.
How are you, my friend? I send greetings. But nothing sent ever
gets to you. Serpents at the dark gate snatch them into a calabash full
of venom & air them. Now the city lies stung. Everyone in my street has
a grief sizeable to their body. It’s a ritual to wake up to mornings garbed in cadavers.
Is it the same over there? A clergy once told me I’m a child of word. I swear I do not know
what to say about my grief the night my mother died. If I say the moon disappeared from the sky
I mean the language of loss is universal. My grief ordered all the people in my clan to weep.
My grief hates revolution. My grief is a government against the birthplace of breath.
Against the earth moulding boys who would one day rewrite the stars. Who would
write the poetry in life & the life in poetry. My grief dials my number & tells me
he loves me. I’m under threat to profess love to what kills me. My grief,
both gun & bullets. Both knife & wound. My grief writes the names
of children in sands & wipes them with feet. My grief emerges from
Palestine, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Benin, Ukraine,
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia.
My grief knows itself a bird but doesn’t know I am not a kind 
of tree. At an exhibition, my grief is a piece of art & priceless.
My grief is a hollow at the colonial borders. My grief
is always hungry for a country. My grief burrows me
into a dead language so grave becomes a homeland.
My grief eats joy. My grief drinks vodka
with 200% ABV, combining grain with
sorrow water & botanical extracts
of Terror Thistle & Wild Elderflower.
On a lonely walk to the farm,
tall grasses are hiding
my grief.

Everything Scatters at Passing

To be buried alongside a lover, tomb kissing tomb, I called bliss. 
In an old burial ground I grew up to know swallowed my people,

a woman’s planetary is some miles away from her man. In other places,
all the dead go home before home. & everything scatters at death

no matter the oath binding the love birds. This is no insertion: every second,
my mother longs for my father’s hug because their gravestones are apart. 

A woman, pious to her man like I am to poetry requests to own the same room 
with him after life. I do not know if she wants heaven & earth to be light out 

same time. I plant my ear in her chest — it is to know what her desire breathe.
Life, death, & even entombment isn’t difficult if not for desires like this.

I’m trying to say while she exits this space for a nap in a mausoleum,
her man could still be awake, heavy hearted with withered roses 

in his mouth, scribbling elegies for her & praying safe ferrying beyond.
Whatever — tell me, you who knows much about the dead, 

what guarantees that love birds would still be lovers after death?
Isn’t it truthful that some men die bird death — an inconsiderate fall? 

Take it to be I’m a budding poet — what metaphor is right for bodies 
splintered by bombs — ounce of sand? What should I write about the men 

lost in sea — do they have a crypt in whales’ belly? You know that I’m here
in Nigeria — if I say that my great grandfather’s skin lies in a foreign land,

do you get the gist? I’m saying that my ancestors have tombs scattered
around the world. & someday, I might own one here, there or never.

Sandplay Therapy

It is so alive in us, the wild flame of holiness.
But the first person to sandplay wasn’t a child.

Instead of water, spittle & he moulded an image: the world
& the people later swallowed by the brightness of art called sin.

The serpent, the fang in his mouth which was called rose.
The tree, its fruit — the very thieves of our paradise.

A mirror brought everything bare as it was Adam before surrendering
to desire. There were men living closely to God, who elbowed

the dirty act of touching mud. No wonder, it’s a woman
who, in a funk, picked the moulding hands of God.

You & I under a mango tree, in orchard. In all our chats,
no whisper about those who slipped into life through

the needle’s eye. I have imagined Ladi in an oversized hoodie
& ripped jeans. In another imagination, she posts her artworks

on social media, capturing likes that can’t be bartered for food.
Or unravel the long history of a generational massacre.

Which do you recommend, stay in my room for the world
to come or meet the world in tiniest of places?

God, you gave me words & earth & metaphor. In the hardest
of times, there must continue to be something to build a bread.

Something to build an amplifier in my people’s mouth.
Something to shape our bones into steels.

The vastness of what earthen can do now lives in museums.
Somehow, my voice goes silent & I teach the sand to mourn for me.

I open myself to no doubt about the religion in poetry pottery,
What duty is of metaphor vessel if not to embrace what pours?

In imitation, I hand-coiled a thing, & it’s not my country.
To tell her story, give me sand, water, & my people’s limbs.

Blessing Ojo is a Nigerian poet based in Abuja, where he spends most of his time teaching creative writing, crafting poetry, and guiding children to literary and art festivals. His poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, The Shallow Tales, Cọ́n-scìò, The Poetry NND Column, The Deadlands, and elsewhere. He coordinates the Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation, Abuja. He is the recipient of the 9th Korea-Nigeria Poetry Prize (Ambassador Special Prize) Award, the 2024 Eugenia Abu/Sevhage International Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the 2025 Golden Award for Art Administrators, and the 2026 Visual/Experimental Poetry Award.

*Image by Rohan Reddy on Unsplash