i heave the morning on my shoulders.
let God bear the weight of my nights.
my ma says it is sin to make God
my errand boy. a prayer is no prayer
if it makes God do my bidding.
there is a place for such prayers on
heaven’s road. they pile into a bonfire
that illuminates the way for well-made petitions.
rebellion, i say, will light the way to redemption.
the morning is God’s making;
the night my unmaking of his making.
if i tend to his creation,
let God tend to my desecration.
Damilare Popoola is a writer and medical doctor from Nigeria. He is an alumnus of Sprinng Writing Fellowship ’24. His works have appeared in Writers’ Space Africa, Flash Flood Journal, Pepperlit Coast, and Poetry Journal. He believes stories are not the consequences of life, but the reason for it. And he hopes to make his reader understand that in how he tells them.
