Longlisted Poem: “Ode to Joe Ushie”
VITALIS CHINEMEREM ILOANWUSI is a Nigerian poet, writer, and scholar in English and Literary Studies. He currently serves as a Graduate Assistant at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, where he also graduated with First Class Honours. He is the author of Painful Shadows (2022) and Unmerited Order (Tears of a Nation) (2024). He was Best Poet of the Year for the 2024 Big Odyssey Poetry Competition.
Ode to Joe Ushie
What if I became Joe Ushie?
A name carved in the rhythm of time,
With words as tender as the dawn’s first light,
Where every line I write is a river,
Rushing through the earth with the weight of truth,
Cutting through the valleys of ignorance,
And flowering in the deserts of despair.
What if I became Joe Ushie?
A voice woven from the fabric of the sky,
Stitching the clouds with syllables of change,
Where every poem I pen is a song of defiance,
A song that shatters silence,
A song that awakens the winds to dance,
In the fields of justice, love, and peace.
What if I became Joe Ushie?
A dreamer whose eyes hold the secrets of the stars,
Who gazes upon the earth and sees its scars—
And in his gaze, a thousand songs bloom,
Like flowers in a garden forgotten by time.
What if my words could lift the weight of sorrow,
And build bridges from the ashes of pain?
What if I became Joe Ushie?
A soul whose pen runs wild like the rivers of Africa,
That writes not only for the present,
But for the unborn,
For the voices of the oppressed,
For the hearts that tremble in shadows,
For the world that needs a savior,
Not in flesh, but in thought, in ink, in verse.
What if I became Joe Ushie?
I’d be the poet who sings the songs of the earth,
The winds would know my name as they carry my words,
The trees would whisper my verses,
And every leaf, every branch, every bud,
Would bloom in reverence to the power of a dreamer,
To the power of a poet who dared to weave the world anew.
What if I became Joe Ushie?
I’d write for the hope that lives in the soil,
For the rivers that carry the heartbeats of nations,
For the stories we must tell,
For the truth that demands to be heard,
For the voices that cannot cry,
And for the future that can still be saved.
So I ask, what if I became Joe Ushie?
I would be the echo in the valleys,
The fire in the dark,
The ink that flows unbroken,
Writing the world back into shape—
A poet, a dreamer, a healer of hearts.