Aziba Ekio Completes ‘The Color, Green’ Poetry Anthology

Nigeria-based Aziba Ekio, who received the Jury Prize following the inaugural Young Climate Prize cycle in 2023, has finished her poetry anthology following years of work. The Color, Green is a collection of poems influenced by Ekio’s personal, first-hand experiences of the climate crisis in her home country and community, and the hopes for a better world if we all contribute to taking care of our shared environment.

During YCP Cycle 01, Ekio was paired with mentor Sumayya Vally, who advised and guided her project’s direction. With continued support from Vally and The World Around team, she is now looking to find a publisher for the manuscript. If you’re interested in learning more about the project or publishing the anthology, please contact Ekio via LinkedIn.

In celebration of her milestone achievement, The World Around asked Ekio to introduce the titular poem from the anthology—which she also recited as part of our In Focus: Radical Repair event in Milan. We are proud and excited to share her work again with our community. Read her introduction and the full poem below.

Before this is a poem about climate, it is a poem about people: about memory, home, and the quiet grief of watching the familiar disappear. It is the titular poem in a collection of the same name, with pieces that echo its central themes.

Set in Ogbia, in the Niger Delta, it traces a journey from childhood innocence to the slow realization that green is no longer just a color but a promise broken. Through floods, displacement, and the language of loss, the speaker confronts what it means to survive when survival itself feels like surrender. Yet within the ache, there is tenderness, resilience, and an unextinguished longing to belong. This is not just a story of disaster—it is a story of love, of place, and of the will to keep both alive.

The collection took time to come together, but I’m glad it’s finally complete. It is, in many ways, the birth-child of the Young Climate Prize. I remember writing the first few poems before the fellowship, but afterward, my consciousness of both the built and natural environment deepened. I began to see that I wasn’t merely a spectator in my world—I was part of its making and unmaking. I hope this poem offers readers that same permission: to see themselves not as distant observers, but as participants in the story of our shared environment.

The Color, Green

We scuttled along

village roads

we pretended

were runways.

Back then

Green was just a color

and not a manifesto.

Back then

Black was not the air in my lungs

or the dust beneath my feet

or the streams crying bait

when the fishes are

long dead to protest.

In Ogbia,

there are no more runways.

I wake up

to claps of water

stealing fragments of my home.

I used to think floods were

natural disasters

Nature scolds her children

beat down and black by

currents whose penalty

condemns only the defenceless.

I used to think floods were

natural disasters until I watched my father

meltdown, salvaging

vestiges of our home

drenched

in what the government names,

a heavenly downpour

an act of god

a poor drainage system.

(Poor is the color, brown

that cannot be tilled anymore

Poor is the color, green

floating in bowls

fetched from streams

stormed by toxins

Poor is the color of

wilting varnish

peeling walls

cracked floors

awash by bitter tides.

Poor is colorless:

my brother’s tears,

a well,

a stream,

a fountain,

every drop flows

from a community

that is forced

to flee home.)

In Ogbia,

there are no more runways.

I cannot wheel against the tar

this ground is the ocean’s bed

this runway is now a runlet.

My brother asks me

if our home will still

be home by Christmas.

I tell him we are survivors,

we’ve always been survivors

But there is a difference

between living and surviving

Surviving?

That is no way to live.