The Ballad of Empty Mind – A Poem by Bolutife Oluwadele
A Ballad of Empty Mind Behold the sage who scrolls at dawn, With thumb a-blur and mind withdrawn, Who skims a headline, reads a tweet, And deems his morning brain complete. He knows no history, knows no fact; Yet nuance cannot pierce his act. Yet…
Spectacle over Scrutiny – A Poem by Bolutife Oluwadele
Spectacle over Scrutiny We rush to raise the gilded, gleaming throne, Before we ask what clay the structure bears; We throw our garlands at the latest show, Too dazzled by the flash to see the snares. In days of old, the anvil felt the fire, And…
‘Hybrid Beings’ A Poem by Fortune Omosola
Hybrid Beings These hybrid beings, are unsweetened, salty egrets layering. Are we in death, deceiving, or beings in mock, afraid? From what grand order are we receiving, to what judgment are we set ablaze? For what burden do we bear this pain that…
We Want Our Brains Back – A Poem by Bolutife Oluwadele
We want our brains back We pried the skulls. Found cobwebs. Dust. A memo: “Gone to rust.” They traded cortex for a feed, let algorithms pull the weed now nothing grows but secondhand need. I’ve seen the hollows walk…
Tears of The Helpless – A Poem by Bolutife Oluwadele
Tears of the Helpless For Oyo’s captives, and a maths teacher who solved his last equation in blood. The chalk stopped mid-equation. His cries fed only vultures. He was doing what a meagre salary paid him to do: teaching children to solve for x and y,…
Humanity Monetized and a Conscienceless Generation – A Poem By Bolutife Oluwadele
Humanity Monetized and a Conscienceless Generation We used to know that a cry for help was not a marketplace bell, not a trumpet summoning merchants to price compassion by the weight of their visibility. Now, even pity has learnt…
Ceaseless Bleeding on The Plateau – A Poem by Bolutife Oluwadele
Ceaseless Bleeding on The Plateau The harmattan drags its dusty shroud across the plateau’s broken spine. In a room of scattered sandals and silent bread, a mother folds herself around a boy who will not wake. She rocks him not the…
ENULABI ( The Promise Breaker – A Poem By Bolutife Oluwadele
ENULABI At the graveside where young mother sleeps, Where both parents’ earth still freshly weeps, They come with words like woven gold, “Come to the city, leave this cold. We’ll give you life, we’ll give you light, We’ll…
The Carpenter’s Unseen Hand:A Poem on the Synergy of Dìgbòlugi and Agbégilódò by Bolutife Oluwadele
I. The Standing Tree In the beginning, the tree stood. Roots drinking deep of ancestral earth, branches held high as offerings to the sun, its leaves a language whispering to the wind. It stood, and standing, was enough. It did not know it…
Fortune Omosola’s ‘Poetry Is Therapeutic’ Recasts Verse as a Tool for Survival
Nigerian poet and journalist Fortune Omosola says poetry is a lifeline that people can use to find their way in a digital yet inundated world. In his newly released book, Poetry Is Therapeutic, Omosola argues that verse is more than artful language. To…