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By Oyindamola Shoola For two years, you've huffed and puffed.Yesterday, you did a negativity diet;today, your cure is a sunbath.Tomorrow, it will be a gummy bearthe Kardashians share,and next week, it will be a slimming teapromoted by an Instagram herbalist. Even your madness knows no Godand your salvation is on a diet.When the usher served ...
By Splendor Victor In this poem, I am not withering anymore.I wake to the petrichor of soft light, and I recalllast night it rained—angel wings drizzlinglike daffodils. And see now, a garden.And butterflies dizzy with joy. God breezes by atevening. He sneezes and I catch a blessing.It is a beloved thing, that this heart, though ...
By Abdulrazaq Salihu For the people that hold me with fur My misery is a small pill,A body, punished by light& at the threshold of mySuffering my mother stretchesHer hands towards the darknessBefore it touches the flowersIn us, and my mother callsThe evil by its pulse beforeIt reaches for our names& my mother sings a ...
We are pleased to announce that Fatihah Quadri Eniola is the new Social Media Curator of Poetry Column-NND. Born on a Friday in December, Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a Nigerian poet whose work has been featured in Torch Literary Arts, Blue Marble Review, Agbowo, The SoFloPoJo, The Shore Poetry, and elsewhere. She is gathering experience in ...
By Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo after Notes on Ambition by Ernest Ogunyemi The soil once vegetated by luscious fernsIs now riddled with summer heat & dry stumps. Mutable music of seasons rends meThe essence of life—steadied for fruition, Seeking rudder for riches until Grace spillsFrom its potent cup. Jubilant moths swamping the lantern neverContemplate the wick ...
We are pleased to announce that Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi is the new Assistant Curator of Poetry Column-NND. He takes over from Ayo W. Oriolowo in this role. Muiz Ọpẹ́yẹmí Àjàyí (Frontier XVIII) is an Editor of The Nigeria Review, Poetry Reader for Adroit Journal, Literary Head of the University of Ibadan LDS. Winner of the ...
We are pleased to announce that Michael Imossan is the new Curator of Poetry Column-NND. He takes over from Pamilerin Jacob in this role. Michael Imossan was one of the inaugural winners of the Nigerian NewsDirect Chapbook Award, for his chapbook, "For the Love of Country and Memory." He is a poet, playwright and editor ...
We are pleased to announce the judges of the 2024 edition of NIGERIAN NEWSDIRECT CHAPBOOK AWARDS are The NIGERIAN NEWSDIRECT CHAPBOOK AWARDS is an initiative of Poetry Column-NND that seeks to promote the voices of Nigerian poets, as the column does weekly in our newspaper. We hope to prioritise consistency of the award, and in so doing, ...
2022 winner, NewsDirect Poetry Chapbook Prize, Michael Imossan, has been named winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, 2024 for his full-length manuscript “All That Refuses to Die.” The African Poetry Book Fund, APBF, disclosed this on Wednesday, July 24, 2024, via a statement made available to Nigerian NewsDirect. One of the ...
The NIGERIAN NEWSDIRECT CHAPBOOK AWARDS is an initiative of Poetry Column-NND that seeks to promote the voices of Nigerian poets, as the column does weekly in our newspaper. We hope to prioritise consistency of the award, and in so doing, document the vibrant work being put out by contemporary Nigerian poets. Two selected poets will ...
By Nwodo Divine The rasp of a moth wing, caught between windowpane and the moon's hard gaze. A silent question mark fluttering against the future, the shadow stretched before our eyes, but kept moving towards the bloom, petals heavy with the scent of honeyed bees. Stars were bright pinpricks against the velvet dark, the storm ...
By Samuel A. Betiku With Nigeria's economy and poverty levels worsening, abductions have become an almost daily occurrence in recent years — Reuters Until now, you savoured the world in packets of myth, moon- lit frolic and a cot where the soft ripple of praise succeeds the rooster's call and the amber flush of afterglow. ...
From Darling Hair commercials to Swallow on Netflix and the stylistic experiments of his early showreels, Oluwatise Oluwajuwon has built a career defined by clarity of vision and technical precision. Speaking with Flourish Joshua, he reflects on narrative flow, invisible VFX, team dynamics, and the evolving future of hybrid digital artists. Flourish:Your motion-design reel and ...
By Kei Vough Korede In a dream, two bars of soap Were handed to me— One containing melancholy. The other, mirth. A voice instructed me to give The former to my father and keep The latter for myself. I broke each bar into half And handed a half of each soap to my father: His ...
By Daniel Orisaeke On the shoreline, I watch the sun—a halved-cut lemon dip into the sea, language written in the dance of waves there is a pull and I succumb. The man beside me murmurs a few words about dying. Iniquities, like beads, jut out from my pores before hands drown me into a sea ...
By Alobu Emmanuel —after Saheed Sunday The day I realised the earth's misery was when my keyboard's auto-correct called me a poor earth instead of a poet. the earth is beautiful; so beautiful that mother nature should slice our hands for daring to touch her this way. now i sit by the sea & pray ...
By Kayode Ayobami say each line two times; one with your right ventricle and the other with the apex of your tongue. Give me the audacity to be beautiful in The face of chaos. Let my breath outpace The speed of flood. To have the ability to drown my worries in the gurgle of laughter. ...
By Salami Alimot Temitope I sit on a stool in my room, beside the window, with the sun reflecting towards me, disguised as optimism. I am thinking about the direction of my life. Some day, obstinance steams my inside, making me fall into the frosty mouth of my wrongs—in them I find no peace. I ...
By Abdulbasit Oluwanishola You don't have to reach the pharynx of the river before you stumble on your people—on their carcasses. water is careless. it even stomachs dirt. it shakes hand to the filthy proposal of men. and don't ask about your mother, it is evanescent. it is the autopsy of your people. you're not ...
By Rafiat Lamidi there was more hope. The first time I peered into the inside of a television, I was lost Everything was sunny pink, I thought it would burst The redness seeped through me as a ghost, white I was full of light, trying to be a person I wanted a body that could ...
By Wisdom Adediji Night nests upon the sky, and the moon, too shy, cowers behind my neighbour's roof. The rubbles left in silence's womb burst loose as the wind wrestle against the lineage of spine leaves holding my window pane from falling, from wedging off its wearily nailed calvary after years of unfulfilled promise to ...
The Sprinng Annual Poetry Contest is back, and this year, courtesy of Poetry Column-NND, three writers will each stand a chance to win N15,000 Cash and N10,000 gift cards to shop at Roving Heights. Timeline: The contest opens on March 1 and ends on June 30. The long-list will be announced on August 1, and ...
By Precious Okpechi there’s a kite testing how fast it needs to glideto halt a cloud in space; a light travelling acrossthe globe like saturn’s wedding ring; the small town below looks like a network of dendrites: a littlegreen here and there, pico-dust storms there andhere – i fear there isn’t any grief it can’t ...
By Agunbiade Kehinde Definitions belong to the definers — Toni Morrison Dawn is an open book for the hopes of travellers.They say by the time it breaks with its pitcher of boon,And the secrets of its rites of passage,Let them not be found wanting. I say amen. You say amen.This is the prayer of burdened ...
By Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, / like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season. - Jb5.26 & bones once chiseled in youth, leaned toward a lingo. —how evening grasses tint in sunshine. ‘cause the weight of green bears them a deadline. life is ...
