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<pre class="wp-block-verse has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-155b178a14e6bafb5e85ce28d27ed353">— after Blessing Omeiza Ojo<br><br>I do not know what you're looking for in this poem,<br>but if you see it, it's because I feel the need to say<br>the truth about this home, about the lawmakers; quick<br>to change our anthem but slow to paint us smiling<br>on a canvas. Here, night walks into our rooms &; walks<br>away with our bodies. Before now, at a newspaper stand,<br>I wanted to condemn the massacre of school of boys<br>but I didn't –– I didn't know who stood behind me.<br>Like a boy who the grave took for dinner yesterday.<br>The story was: he mimicked the head, &; his followers,<br>with clubs, showed him the path of a thousand<br>laugh. What you called fear, I called reverence.<br>What do you do to a god who saves not, but kills its own?<br>Should it be starved of a kolanut &; palm oil? Perhaps, songs?<br>I told my mother I cut my tongue yesterday, it's the [ ] new<br>anthem I do not want to sing. I tell you in this poem that<br>I wish I could remember my name, it's the anthem I do not<br>want to memorize. In a decade &; a half of my life here,<br>I've sang what doesn't give roof on a rainy day. What tower<br>lies in this one which is reminiscent of a dirge sang to my losses here?</pre>



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<p class="has-text-align-right has-black-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size" style="background-color:#ade6fe"><em>Sa’ada Isa Yahaya (she/her) is a young Nigerian writer of Ebira descent. She is a student at Jewel Model School, Kubwa, Abuja and a member of the Abuja chapter of the Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation (HCAF). She won the on-the-spot poetry prize at HIASFEST 2024. Her works have appeared in Blue Marble Review, Cá»ÌN-SCÌÒ Magazine, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere.</em></p>
 
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Dear Editor, | a CỌ́N-SCÌÒ poem by Sa’ada Isa Yahaya

