A peep into a poet’s synthesised thoughts

A review of Ololade Nafisat Ejemdibia’s Thoughts in Verses By Moshood Folorunsho.

Thought is a mental process on ideas, themes, etc that usually precedes actions such as communication, problem-solving, decision-making, and conceptualisation.

There is hardly any action that a person wants to take without thinking about it first.

Communication as an action has four major forms – verbal, non-verbal, written, and visual. Thus, ‘Thoughts in Verses’ is a series of mental processes on different themes that are being communicated by the author through poetry.

This collection features 50 inspirational poems by Ololade Ejemdibia and published in 2022 by OAK Initiative, a publishing arm of OAK Foundation, which is a charity organisation established with the aim of supporting indigent students, widows and the orphans in Africa. The set of 50 poems has the drive that will enable the reader to immerse in it for a long time and see a clearer view of all the themes explored by the poet.

The poems can be grouped under 14 different themes – change, love, knowledge, feeling, period, hatred, hope, light, environment, life and death, corruption, power, virtue and evil.

Change, it is said, is the only constant thing in life. Nine poems, ‘Boy and Man’, ‘Different’, ‘The Cracked Egg’, ‘Growing older’, ‘Change’, ‘Shifting World’, ‘Dynamic’, ‘What is Change’, and ‘Dying World’ fit into this theme and depict not only different forms of change but also how difficult it is to notice some forms of change.

In ‘Different’ for example, ‘In the morning you will wake/And everything will be just the same’. This line is ironical and shows how difficult to notice any change between the time when one sleeps and wakes.

‘But something will be different today. Something will have changed’, the poet is still not sure that something has changed, but really something has changed and what has changed could be you.

One of the best poems in this theme is ‘The Cracked Egg’ which is a metaphor for a life of struggle. The struggle may crack us facially, but the poet admonishes that we should keep our hearts as they were, ‘Now I have been cracked/And my insides are on display … But I am no less worthy than before/For my insides are just as they were’.

In this collection, four poems fit into the theme of love. They are, ‘Love Proposal’, ‘Happiness By Your Side’, ‘Each Other’ and ‘Aloneness’. The language of love is universal. Once it is expressed in any form, it is usually understood.

In ‘Each Other’, the poet uses love as a panacea to pain and anguish. Once two people are in love, they have nothing but each other for comfort in any chaotic situation. ‘Happiness By Your Side’ is like ‘Each Other’ in context. In that poem, the two characters go further and dream of overcoming their fear and finding happiness by staying side by side with each other.

Four poems, ‘Flaming Hatred’, ‘Dark Cloud’, ‘What Love Is’ and ‘Hatred Is A Cancer’ fit into the theme of hatred.

‘Knowledge’ is another theme of importance. Five poems, ‘Looking For Knowledge’, ‘The Price of Knowledge’, ‘The Path’, ‘That Desire’, and ‘Self Doubt’ are suitable for this theme.

In ‘The Price of Knowledge’, every price paid in seeking and acquiring knowledge is worth it at the end. It buttresses the famous saying, ‘If acquiring knowledge is expensive, try ignorance’.

‘Looking For Knowledge’ shows that even having paid the price for knowledge, the process of acquiring it is tedious. How tedious it can be is captured metaphorically by the poet, ‘The only thing you can do is bite/So you plunge your teeth into the rock/ And pull on it with all your strength/Until the rock begins to crumble/Then you bite again, and again, and again, until one day…/You make a hole in the rock/ Big enough to squeeze through.

The theme of corruption has three poems that fit into it, and they are, ‘Political Dearth’, ‘Corrupt’ and ‘The Farce of Democracy’. In ‘Political Dearth’, the poet is bold and direct by saying, ‘They claim to act on our behalf/But they’re actually ruining all our wealth/They are more concerned with lining their pockets’. The poet re-echoes his position in ‘Corrupt’, ‘It’s a world gone mad/And we’re all going bust/Our leaders are lying And taking our money.

Some poems in the entire collection are so lyrical with the use of rhyme scheme.

In all, several figures of speech like metaphor, irony, simile and personification are employed to ensure that the collection bubbles.

With this collection, it is obvious that the author is a synthesist, who is not only creative but also curious in approach.

She explores intellectual ideas and phenomena, and in the process, asks several rhetorical questions and ponders on a range of insightsand possibilities. I will recommend this collection to all and sundry.

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