Olayioye Paul Bamidele presents a poem “about the need for black people to unite irrespective of tribe, culture or tradition.” According to its poet, the poem’s inspiration comes from “the story of slaves being mistreated by their traders, as narrated to me by my father.” The young writer and Mass Communications student adds, “These slaves were mistreated at home and betrayed abroad. Later these people became the freedom fighters of Africa and the founders of the Négritude movements across the globe.”

Dustin Pickering presents a short poem whose “general spirit”—as the poet suggests—”can resonate across different subjects.” One of these, in the least, is the irremediable misery of those who do wrong to others.

All the way from Italy, Martin Pedersen presents four poems that explore memory and experience in four unique ways. From memories of a mother and a grandmother to the experience of thirst and the experience of solitude, Pedersen’s verses are characterized by a purity that arrives with age and silence.

In Mashood Rather’s poem, a mother seeks her son and a son seeks his mother, with the two kept from each other by a spectral curtain that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. The engraver tasked with pronouncing “death with each chisel mark” is their intermediary in these haunting verses where life and death converge as they do tragically upon a valley.

Oyekunle Ifeoluwa Peter presents two poems with the underlying themes of grief, loss and pain, all of which are ontologically located within the geography of a body or within the fragile edifice of being. Both poems convey a maturity that is spiritual and offer verses that communicate the perseverance of a poetic voice that has oared through hurricanes and storms, within and without.

Inverse Journal presents these haunting verses by emerging Nigerian poet Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò, in a poem that attempts to seek distance from the lingering grief caused by death. In the poem, the young poet and Mass Communications student reveals the passing of his friend “who committed suicide this year”, the death of his “grandmother in 2017” and “the gruesome extrajudicial killing of Chibok girls from the Eastern part of Nigeria by Boko Haram.” As the poet states, “Elegy in which I am bidding everything adieu” is a poem “of many grievances, one I may not do away with for years.”

Dr. Asima Hassan brings us a touching poem that addresses the loss of life as it relates to the bond between a mother and a child. Perhaps the most difficult topic to explore through any artform, yet central to Picasso’s “Guernica”, Dr. Hassan’s poem verbalizes the unspeakable to give a contour to unfathomable grief.

Set upon a dark stage that Kashmir has invariably become, Sadam Hussain presents four poems that read like four acts of a macabre tragedy—except there is no curtain call and the curtains are never drawn, there where hell has no end and paradise no beginning.

On World Mental Health Day, Saba Zahoor presents a series of verses that venture into the center of struggles and experiences that remain difficult to communicate yet persist in the lives of millions throughout our human world.