poetry column

Isimmiri

By Offor Emmanuel The silvery flow From atop the rocky sands Streaming, shining, like mermaid’s strands Isimmiri – harbinger of life Dwelling place for shrimps, crabs, toads, turtles, fishes Feeding the thirsty ferns and mosses The dark green trees and…

Monsoon With Òkè Ìdànrè

By Ayokunle Samuel Betiku Dulcet wind, sing of heights. We climb the long-drawn steps into rewards beyond the screaming feet, lift hands in rapture as if to pull gravity into surrender. It is the blue teeming with avian grandeur that…

Adam

By Blessing Omeiza Ojo I found myself in the garden behind our family house and began falling in love with the god in fruits. I would have fallen for the pretty girls on the street of a city in Nigeria…

A poem is an enclave

By Divine Inyang Titus  I wager, outside poems, a mother who falls into a ravine does not rebirth in a burst of angel wings. Her son does not seduce the rain with his tears or beam his glee when the…

poem in which my mother never died

By Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí —my imagination can’t weave it up, language lays cold in my hand, a petalled pistol. nine years, seven months & twenty-four days of being motherless makes you unable to dream a world where you are somebody’s…

phantom

By Rahma O. Jimoh i hold this place with all of its blue waters, dazzling sunlight, tulips & bougainvillea— i transcend into water, curl around fleets of flowers. like a creek, unafraid, i pour into others & the sea mirrors the sky’s…