FACT-BASED JOURNALISM ABOUT JUJU
It’s going to be an elegiac scene, but it isn’t.
A miracle hand touches
my skin & what ought to kill me
professes love to me.
A boy tells me a machine
is to quicken a job.
& as far as I’m concerned,
all of us are jobs for firearms to execute.
Even the man busy with killing
is a job for another jobless man.
Forget about fear, I do not know
the man who brought it here first
but all the blacksmiths in my home
are engineers. At least, we have
a lot of tools here.
What is the spring of the wars among us?
These wars that skilled us
in the art of crafting & spilling?
Eve is alive & pleading.
You do not want to kill me
but you aim at my heart where I keep
our memories ––so frail a word
could break it. Say you’ve
never seen a world breach
& you want it so badly
you walk into my home at night.
My children aren’t different
from the Gazans.
It’s a fact-based journalism
that the man with the finest black magic
wins a battle. That, in spite of the tweets,
deadly big birds still strike with their beaks.
You shoot ––invisible hands caress my body.
I do not fall, I move in the manner of a man
rosy with spirit. My children are alive
so much they look like ghosts.
Don’t worry. I know how to flesh them
by invocation.
APOLOGY TO THE DAMNED
Sorry I appeared religious a century ago, yet didn’t pray for you.
Didn’t love you well to chest the bullet coming for your breath.
You ––the boy at the threshold of memories, a bird in your first life.
The quiet night alive with your dirge entered nowhere
but closed heavens. Something was said about palms nailed
in a bolted balcony & I believed, knowing you went nowhere
after the knockout. I should have known you’re a crisp sentence
the way boys hauled stones at you. It’s never their fault trying out
hunting, but mine––whose audacity spanned to rebellion.
I moved from the pedigree of herbalists to a craftsman.
If only I hadn’t made catapults, I’d have been napping this morning
dirty with joy. & guiltless. You’d have still being a feathered friend.
Perhaps, caged. Even so, you’re still my friend. Touch my blamed body,
ọ̀rẹ́ mi. I want to be made the snow snoozing on Mount Rainier
& enter the sanctuary with the lamb who tends you with miracle.
It’s April. Seraphs’ harps have memorized your names so well
they come out as psalms. & because I heard apocalypse would come
for those exiled away from faith, I promise to be a saint,
I–– who might not have lost anything during rebirth, but God.
AUTHOR’ S BIOGRAPHY
Blessing Omeiza Ojo is a Nigerian poet and writer. He is a creative writing and cultural arts instructor at Jewel Model Schools, the founding editor of Jewel Literary Magazine, and the Coordinator of the Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation, Abuja. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Arts Lounge, Split Lip, The Shallow Tales, Cọ́n-scìò, The Poetry NND Column, The Deadlands, and Okiti Literary, and have been nominated for Best of the Net. His work has received the 9th Korea–Nigeria ASP Poetry Award, the 2025 Idumaese Alao Prize for Literature, and the 2026 Visual/Experimental Poetry Award.
