Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact has emerged winner of the July edition of the BRIGITTE POIRSON POETRY CONTEST (BPPC) 2018. The edition was themed: ‘OF POETS AND IDEOLOGIES’.
Tolulope, a Chemical Engineering graduate of the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State, won the contest with a rhyming triple acrostic entitled DON’T CHAIN US WITH YOUR RULES. PEACEFUL WARRIORS by Gomathi Mohan and HOW A POET’S MIND WORKS by Oni Tomiwa emerged 1st and 2nd runners-up respectively.
Tolulope is one of the most consistent and successful BPPC participants with several top 10 finishes, coming 3rd in April 2015, 1st in June 2016, 4th in July 2016, 7th in February 2017, 2nd in March 2018 and 7th in May 2018. This remarkable record makes him one of the few poets featured in all three editions of the annual BPPC anthologies – WIND OF CHANGE (2015), LOOPS OF HOPE (2016) and THE TRAIN STOPS AT SUNSET (2017).
Since he began writing poetry in 2012, his works have appeared in literary platforms including Words Rhymes & Rhythm Poetry, Duane Poetree, Pulse.Ng, SPIC, Literary Planet, Chrysolite, and Aceword, as well as several poetry anthologies. He has received recognition from several literary organizations in Nigeria.
Tolulope currently resides in Benin City where he writes and imparts children through teaching.
Below are the top 10 poems:
- DON’T CHAIN US WITH YOUR RULES by Ogedengbe Tolu Impact
- PEACEFUL WARRIORS by Gomathi Mohan
- HOW A POET’S MIND WORKS by Oni Tomiwa
- WHAT I SAW by Ezinne Onyekachi Oha
- HOW I BECAME A POET by Aire Joshua Omotayo
- PROPHETS OF LIGHT by Tukur Loba Ridwan
- I AM POETRY by Alexander A. Oduma
- I WILL LIVE TO WRITE by Jamiu Ahmed Adewale
- POIESIS by Emmanuel Udoma
- THE NUMEROUS NOMENCLATURES OF MOTHS by Hussani Abdulrahim
DON’T CHAIN US WITH YOUR RULES by Ogedengbe Tolu Impact
(Triple triolet)
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
We write our poems in our hues
Don’t try to chain us with your rules.
We have found freedom in our tools,
And we ride our words on muse’s wheels.
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
We choose the tools of art to use
Don’t try to chain us with your rules.
See, you may mistake us for fools,
Because we follow our hearts’ thrills.
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
We paint images from our views
Don’t try to chain us with your rules.
We have seen rosy inks spilled blues,
And pens suffered doctrinal ills.
Don’t try to chain us with your rules,
For we are poets with free wills.
PEACEFUL WARRIORS by Gomathi Mohan
As poet, our pen gives us prowess to be warriors with fortitude,
Across nations breaking barriers, winning battles in solitude.
A sword’s metre long blade, fierce and sharp when unleashed,
Cannot achieve what humble tip of a nib can, when published.
Destruction needs no thought, sword just breaks and slays,
But to build, to ingress many a fortress, with elan the role our pen plays!
To protect, restore and expose murky truth our pen keeps up its might,
No matter the milieu, our pen never shies from expounding what is right.
As the pen scribbles away stories of hope and success,
Many lives are shielded from war and its excess.
Peaceful pacts by our pens inked with wit and wisdom,
Have seen it all in history, how it has saved many a kingdom.
Ink flows the message across oceans to reach each continent,
Pen’s power breezes through, its outreach immense and imminent.
As we burn the midnight oil to sit in silence and pen,
Our pen creates many an inspiring work to wreckon.
Subramania Bharti, Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo and the Beat Bards,
Didn’t their pen awaken society by inking the whole nine yards?
Our pen never sheds blood or thrusts hardships upon mankind,
Its quest is to seek the truth to answers, which are hard to find.
When States are run as an entity making war a profitable business,
It is our pen that comes to the fore to lay threadbare, its hollow messiness.
Seeing innocent people at peril, our pen makes a relentless appeal,
War does no good, for the State to grow wise and repeal.
Our pen shakes up from within, the Zen lying dormant therein.
A sleeping society awakens to the debris they are lying in.
Pen heralds in harmony as its ink cadences with poetic chimes,
Poets are peaceful warriors, much needed in present times!
HOW A POET’S MIND WORKS by Oni Tomiwa
Call it first a lagoon.
Still mass with no tributary,
Deep, drowning demeaning demons.
Think of it too as a waterfall,
Restless body of splashing thoughts,
Hitting the base of troubled souls —
Searching for something in nothing.
Say it is like the sun,
Rising each day in restless stirr.
Giving lights to legs, stiffened —
In the dark of dusk;
Giant illumino.
Name it also a dynamo,
Converting mental friction
Into warmth when the world is freezing.
Sometimes it is perched on a drying branch,
Sometimes sailing the sea of the sky
Sometimes it is weaving its new home,
Sometimes it is the kingfisher,
That nakeds the lake of its fishes —
A poet’s mind is a bird.
Tearing apart the haze of the day.
WHAT I SAW by Ezinne Onyekachi Oha
Submerged within my soul are wise words, which my whole craves
Voices whose roaring breath enslaves the caves of sunk slaves
Last night, I dreamed my eyes to death before the mystic moon
I saw silent silhouettes of owls breaking hens’ eggs at noon
And words began to lay long bricks upon the bloodied face of the sun
Amid hissing of grumpy storms like heaving athletes on the run
I saw doors creak open to pass thoughts of flowing ink,
Spilling fresh drops of a new dawn that dry lips may drink
Like pregnant clouds that engulf crippled hills of blurred visions
The scorching flames charred the calm brightness of daylight
And time grew swift wings like a witch on broomstick flight
I gazed at its mirror and saw broken bones of an old hill
The bones became words, birthing the future that poets’ moods instil
Yes, I saw a stream of ghosts sowing seeds of deep muse on mountains
That dogs may bark no more, when pens give life to voids of lame fountains
I dared not wake, for the gods were still drunk with wine,
Stitching poets’ plots in time in a bid to save nine
I lay still for ages to fill the blank pages of my wandering thoughts
Faint rainbows surfaced to breakwaters of a pregnant morn
Yet, my eyes hung shut to sleep like young teeth on a corn
In the arms of a new world, I saw words weaving a basket
Of stars; dumping stale songs of deaf ears in a crumpled casket
I saw the oceans and the deserts making a grand toast
To a new world born from the womb of a poet’s creative post
The gods blessed my snoring eyes to sway away in bed,
To live the times when flashy queens shall bathe a pig’s head
Indeed, the skies are torn to shreds and poets’ words now fall as rain!
HOW I BECAME A POET by Aire Joshua Omotayo
through the nights of fading muse,
and the tincture of rhythm and blues,
my soul danced on the stage of stammering history
with drums and lyres scribbling my story
through the lips of the nightingales,
the gurgling gongs, and moonlight tales,
solitude blared its jingles through my windows
as the snores painted my walls with punching blows
the night’s skin crumbled in tatters of grey
and its body laid in a crucible of silence’s bay
where rivers burn in ruffled flaming borders
as their waves crackled in fiery waters
my lips were blunt like the butt of a sabre
as the remnant of unspoken words formed an acre
of lands serenading the terrains of my mouth
with letters traveling from north to south
my fingers bled on fields of war
when the scrolls of my heart fell in shreds of gore
my tongue became a pink fire rising from a tomb
and the flames beaconed on the hills of morrow’s womb.
this is how I became a bard on blank pages
when the street of my ears wore the feet of the words of sages
the lines of my poetry filed into a long river
and stretched into a rope wetting the fields of green
PROPHETS OF LIGHT by Tukur Loba Ridwan
Given a quill to scribe
of diverse homes & climes,
a poet makes the world a verse
on which thoughts transverse.
Let he be of the ages past
& his words standing time’s test,
or she, of this teeming time
when post-modernism at its prime,
they would not neglect the need
to make love to the sound
of souls seeking to feed
their hearts with humane creeds.
A poet seeks & finds freedom
through the master key of words.
He breaks his chain of doom
by reshaping his plighted world.
She showers spells of sympathy
on wives & mothers whose joy
drained by the pit of matrimony
in the hands of a delinquent hubby.
Poets are prophets of light
thriving through tunnels & thorns.
They are preachers who would fight
the battle of voices lost to scorns.
The earth deserves to be nursed
with views of a better place
left behind the strife of breeds
who toiled to repair the damaged.
I AM POETRY by Alexander A. Oduma
I am the voice you hear
From your sweet love dear,
Which like a swift sharp spear
That pierces a young deer.
I am the segment you use
The brain behind your muse,
I make parallel lines to fuse
And set every bottleneck loose.
I hold the sceptre of a Lord
I give wit, wealth and word,
Am more keen than a sharp sword
More flexible than a boneless cord.
I am your true soulmate,
I give you words to relate
Your deep passion for love or hate
And ever with you in any state.
I give inanimate objects voice
To speak for or against a vice,
In my power, I melt frozen ice,
I lead men to the right choice.
I voyage men to places far and nigh
Even beyond the sky that is so high
From where they sit or lie,
For I am poetry, I never die.
I WILL LIVE TO WRITE by Jamiu Ahmed Adewale
On a cold moonless night. I sat under my roof,
Like a poet’s note waiting for the midnight words.
I watched the stars fading into the gloomy clouds,
The world became a secret; darkness as a proof.
The earth whirled, my eyes rolled like wheels,
Vision became too blur to see through myself,
Thoughts pilled up like books in my mind’s shelf.
Nothing left, but my fingers to write what I feels.
I will live to write my words on the earth crust,
Watch them grow into a garden of rose and fruit.
For folks, friends, foes to feast together at night.
Hold hands; with hearts whiter than dawn frost.
I will live to write my words on heaven’s chest,
For the birds to fly freely without clipped wings,
Sing sonorous song with symphonious strings,
As the trees dance and wave their arms in crest.
I will live to write my words into a fervent rain,
Let them flow like water into a healing river,
To heal the bodies butchered by gory dagger,
When throes become blood that flows in vein.
I will live to write my words on every silver cords,
To free children from mothers enslaving eyebrow,
For different hues to embrace others like rainbow,
I will write till a new world is birth from my words.
POIESIS by Emmanuel Udoma
A thin line stands between him and his creator.
Carries a carbon copy of his maker; he
Breathes life and takes away, at his will
Makes and breaks; a world
Without form, a world of forms!
Sharing in his creator’s creativity; he
Illuminates, heals and mends downcast
And troubled minds, by
Knitting mere words into images
And messages of hope.
Lives and dies to himself daily, and
For a universe he calls his.
The blood spills on pages, and
Bones fossilize into memories, of
Yesteryears and tomorrow that never existed.
Turbulent waters and tempests rage,
In the head and mind,
Of he called the Poet. Daily,
Tears are shed for things wished for; things
That existed only in the mind and on pages
For this world is not his own.
THE NUMEROUS NOMENCLATURES OF MOTHS by Hussani Abdulrahim
i.
How did you paint water?
In ponderance of harmony
I butchered my body
into beautiful colonies
watched the blood flow from each tributary
until I degenerated into a single saltless sea
ii.
How did you evolve?
Sieving self from society’s incessant tags
creased by doubts of one’s anomalies
I struggled to echo the word, LIVE
beneath the strain of snarling hypocrisy
where liberty’s just another way to highlight sequestry
but my combative tongue chiseled her backwards
iii.
And from society’s dementia stems complexities
So for every entity lusting to sketch me
for everything questioning the gaiety of sanity
here, I gift you my souless colonies as libation
in all its shameless, seamless ramifications
and mercurial metamorphosis
iv.
Mirrors are mean men
these colonies are dark rainbows she paints
reflections as inversions of my scar’s rightful niche
v.
We do not need new names!
Pray, let the night strum
into fooled ears of folded men
who with fire kiss what they can’t conjure
who’ve no bile to withstand mutations
Tolulope will be awarded the N8000 cash prize. In addition, his poem and those of all the other TOP 10 finalists will be automatically entered for the ALBERT JUNGERS POETRY PRIZE (AJPP) 2018 and published in the BPPC 2018 anthology. The finalists will also each receive a certificate and a copy of the BPPC 2018 anthology, to be awarded at the Words Rhymes & Rhythm Literary Festival 2018.