What Holds the Sky

Even the stars lean into each other. 
You call it gravity; I call it faith in
a shared fall. The boy in the field
watches a kite pull at the thread, 
his fingers reddening against the
pull of flight. Each tug is a prayer
to the wind; each slack a moment
of grace. At the edge of the city,
the buildings echo a hymn of glass
& steel, each window catching the
sky’s light & passing it on like an
unspoken promise. Somewhere, a crow
rides the curve of the horizon, its wings
a bridge between silence & sound. 
It doesn’t ask what holds it up, only
trusts the air to hold it together. It’s
the tension of staying & leaving, 
of holding & letting go. Tell me,
how do we make peace with the
weight of what we love? The kite
wants the sky; the boy wants the kite.
Both are tethered to a gravity they can’t name.
& maybe this is what it means to belong: 
to lean toward the edge & still find
the ground beneath us. 

A Country That Carries Its Dead Like Firewood

Once, my father told me the heart
of a nation is a well. Pour too much
grief into it, & the rope breaks. I have
watched Nigeria bend under the weight
of loss, its people gathering pieces of
themselves from the rubble of history.
In the north, Deborah’s body is a bonfire.
We do not pray to the ashes anymore;
we scatter them into the harmattan & wait.
Lekki was a river of red. October carries
the memory like a scar, its edges raw,
its center a question no one answers.
Justice sits in a courtroom, its hands tied,
its mouth gagged, its eyes turned to the past.
But listen—even silence has a pulse; even despair
speaks of what can be built again. The sky is heavy
with names, but it is also heavy with rain. Something
is coming—you can feel it in the air. If unity is a song,
then let it be loud enough to drown the sound of bullets.
Let it be a hand extended, pulling us from the brink into
the light of ourselves.

Mogrify

A preacher walked down my street, his voice 
soft as harmattan wind, speaking of a woman 
who learned how to shift her grief into fur, 
how to turn her sadness into a cat. 
In my town, cats are more than animals; 
they are omens, prayers whispered too close to sin.
But my mother, her hands always smelling 
of soup & warm bread, taught me to feed the living 
& the hungry, no matter the form they wear. 
At night, after the pots are scrubbed clean, 
I watch her— the cat, with her hunger like an old song, 
her eyes filled with the ache of a thousand years.
She eats the remnants of our kindness, 
lapping it up like she’s trying to remember 
how it feels to be whole again. & in return, 
I leave her more— a pinch of my mother’s patience,
a spoonful of love,  a hope that maybe, this will be enough.
Two days ago, my neighbor called— said there was a dead cat
on the street. But when I looked, I saw something else. 
A body that once held so much hunger, now at peace.
Her soul was full, & the body was just a quiet place, 
an empty house the spirit had outgrown.