This paper examines “Season of the Unnameable,” a Nigerian COVID-19 poem by Okinba Launko (Femi Osofisan). It analyses how Launko portrays the pandemic as an active antagonist through the framework of tragic absurdism. Drawing on Albert Camus’s theory of the tragic absurd, the essay highlights Launko’s use of aesthetic strategies, such as structural fragmentation, dramatic devices, vivid imagery, euphemism, paradox and indigenous cultural references, to express the psychological and social disruptions wrought by COVID-19. Rather than simply recording suffering, Okinba Launko uses these techniques to dramatise the struggle between human meaning-making and an incomprehensible global crisis. The paper concludes that Launko’s tragic absurdism recasts the pandemic as a dramatic force, against which African poetic expression demonstrates its resilience, rendering local experience into a universally resonant form of tragic art.