Our mother’s prayer was a sacrifice salted with love for her family...
The cemented floor had whitened our mother’s
chocolate knees
Almost as white as the ceiling –
The silent, blank middleman between God and mother
God bless my husband and my children too
Our mother’s prayer was a sacrifice salted with love for
her family
But it seemed our mother’s prayer was another Cain-ish
sacrifice
Or God was too far away in His cloudy cosmos
And our mother’s prayer was like the Tower of Babel –
It would never reach God’s gold-tiled compound
So God didn’t know when the dark tongue of the road
Licked life out of our job-hunting father
Or probably God knew about everything
Probably He knew too that our frequent fasting was a
product of poverty
And not piousness
So he had decided to punish us
To punish us hard like sinners in hell
Samuel Oluwatobi Olatunji is a final-year student of English at the University of Lagos, Lagos State.
