Millions of Poems were written in 2024, some for fun, others for wit and many more for purpose.
This is not a shortlist of the best but a few that were put forward to lead you to the rest. Enjoy.
Tribute to Waju
Omo Akin,
The iconoclast,
A radiant gem in the halls of microphones,
Converter of mechanical to electric energy—
The Dynamo, the defiant!
Who could decipher your sighs or the wry curve of your smile?
Something unspoken, speaking volumes,
Foretelling a silent departure,
Unveiling fear and hushed lamentations
For a voice that once echoed with power,
A vibration that awakened the world.
In entertainment, you set the skies ablaze,
In sports, you commanded authority,
In analysis, you struck with precision.
Among friends and colleagues, you flowed like water,
Singing in the reels of the angelic.
Adorned in elegance, your cap and presence spoke volumes,
Yet we missed the signs—
That your stage was set for the rapture.
Rest in greatness,
Waju.
( From your buddy, The General )
The Trees’ Testament
Trees don’t die;
they multiply like bullets in human storms,
each one a storyteller,
standing alone yet breeding life into the earth.
Their hearts beat in droplets of rain,
nourishing their roots,
the rain, their eternal wealth,
bestowed upon the world.
Silent sentinels offering rest to weary humans.
– F.Omosola
Lances at the edges of light – Samuel Betiku
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. What did you know of a country
flailing outside the stained glasses of your eyes, eyes your mother looked into
to relearn the curves of a hymn: what did you know of being a prey
or of a complicit knot of trees and underbrush lining a dire trail,
blanketing the gleam of tomorrow. You watch your friends trudge on,
each laboured step a prayer no one dares to say out loud. When you open
your mouths, it is to let out a wisp of stifled cry, to risk the gruff nudge
of a gun. At the end of the road, your plundered selves waiting, inescapable.
What can you give to stay a haloed house? You look down at your feet
crusted with crimson and grit and imagine your mother sitting outside
the shed, the quiet sob of petition, the drooped heft of her brow, barely able
to stare at a sky spangled with lights closer to home than her daughter.
Transcendental
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. – JbJb5.26
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 short but not
static. & beautiful:
roses & rosebushes.
man with the image
of a graveyard. dust.
whether soft or silken,
simply defining.
inescapable:
the morning light
will rest on a
dead eye. terribly
finding him ripped
of a route.
once trailed in the
mouth of existence.
—This tabernacle
not certain [how he
came, became, &
wont to unbecome].
but before the
triune man swift
to preempt. & course
into apparition.
let the body,
sag & flesh. ripen
& ready. God molds
your craft: a plea,
prayer, & a promise.
And my mother…
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 my
Suffering my mother stretches
Her hands towards the darkness
Before it touches the flowers
In us, and my mother calls
The evil by its pulse before
It reaches for our names
& my mother sings a prayer,
One syllable away from god,
The other towards our reckoning
& my mother becomes a cradle
Of colors, black all the way—
Black all the way and my mother
Blooms in place for the rain,
& life, with its blunt claws
Swivels a knife into our
Music and rayuwa abun takaici ne,
Life is a thing of despair &
At the end of my supposed life,
My mother will be there, small
As hope in the mouth of desperation,
Small as tastebuds on the palette of
The tongue, my mother will be there
Arms stretched wide enough to hug
Something so beautiful and small.
Poems are inestimable
