Olusoji Obebe // Winner, Fidelis Okoro’s Prize for Poetry, 2024

Question: A bullet ran into a boy. The radio said the body was missing. The government said the shot was fired by an unknown gunman. There was a country for the people but there was no country between the people. So some said they wanted justice; others, evidence. Alas, everyone was finding something. As a ___, find the lacuna.

Note: Remember to find yourself as well.

in this poem, the issues, inter alia, set out for determination are:

(1) whether or not peace has dawned without drowning the people

(2) whether or not justice could morph into a silence looming after a gunshot

(3) whether or not unity is trapped in labyrinth of diversity

(4) whether or not there is a language to untell the story

generally, there are no rules for the dooming of man. after all, man is but a plaything of fate. and unloving this country is learning how safest to die.

on the first sabbath of june twenty-twenty, there was a shower of fire, and tributaries of blood eroded the peace of the church. similarly in a case reported in the troubled heart of the country, there was a girl, some peace, a bunch of zoop(h)agans and then, fire! or to put rightly, there was fire, a bunch of zoop(h)agans, some peace and a girl.

flowing from the above, justice is juggled so that it wails like the police siren, and then every dose of law it gives is the death before its antidote.

unarguably, we fly by falling. the flight of every man is learnt in a bird paying obeisance to archership. more often than none, we just effortlessly fall back into the silence we sprout out from. but to live together is to leave with a multitude of scars, mapping out the dissonance our body is shrouded with.

at the end we run into the mouth of this lacuna, the size that of a grave.


Olusoji Obebe is a law student at the University of Benin, a Nigerian creative writer & a poetry reader at Fiery Scribe Review. He’s a BoTN nominee, 2nd Runner-up of Poetically Written Prose 2022 & 3rd Prize Winner of African Human Rights Short Story Competition 2023. His works are published in local & international mags & journals which include Brittle Paper, Salamander, Pepper Coast Lit, Morrab Library(UK), TSTR Review, Lumiere Review, & elsewhere.