Longlisted Poem: “The Day the Sky Refused to Be Blue”
PAUL OLAYIMIKA is from Ekiti State, Nigeria, where as a kid he scribbled stories that now blur into vague memories. After secondary school, poetry took hold of him. These days, he’s juggling poetry and medical school at the University of Jos, which is no joke for someone who treats sleep like his ultimate escape. When he’s not buried in medical books or dreaming up verses, PAUL is all about the thrill of football and F1 races. On top of that, he’s a brand designer, turning ideas into visuals that pop, much like how he crafts words. He is currently chasing that buzz of sharing his stuff.
The Day the Sky Refused to Be Blue
Somewhere—an ossuary of vellum and ash,
where books exhale their own extinction
and the air murmurs the nomenclature of the forgotten—
rests an atlas:
spine in ruin,
folios adrift from gravity’s tired insistence.
Here, the continents disarticulate:
Africa eddying toward Antarctica,
Asia in sly orbit, flirting with the lunar pull.
And on a morning indistinguishable from myth—
was it a hand, or merely the insistence of wind—
the atlas was opened.
The sky, perceiving, shuddered—
an unnoticed synapse between the atmosphere
and the paper’s ancient breath.
It was the day the firmament misplaced its coordinates.
Beneath, the city stirred—
coffee brewing, alarms groaning,
pavements warming beneath half-laced shoes.
But the sky—the sky would not comply.
It staggered into the hour
draped in a vestment of graphite, bruised inks,
casting off light like errant scripture.
It swathed itself
in a bolted brocade of stormclouds,
uttering a sound decipherable
only to the deep-rung memory of trees.
Then—folding its cerulean skin
into the precise geometry of an abandoned crane,
tucked onto a shelf of yesterdays.
The sun peeked—
a hesitant child behind velvet curtains,
then receded.
Signals faltered:
traffic lights blinked in arrhythmic dissent,
pigeons mislaid their choreographies.
Even time stumbled—watches slowed,
minutes thickened like syrup.
And below—
umbrellas, dark blossoms beneath a trembling sky;
voices tempered;
shopkeepers forgot their rehearsed greetings.
And beneath a sky that refused to be blue,
The theatre of the day, unscripted.
For even the heavens crave insurrection.
Even the sky may declare:
This day, I shall not perform.