One Prayer

By Joemario Umana | From Prairie Schooner – Fall 2026

Explore: Poetry

The evening collects God from the mosque’s megaphone.
Next to birdsong, the muezzin call is holy. I don’t need

to understand Arabic to hear the softness of reverence.
Men gather, cupping water in their hands, letting it spill

over skin—an offering of themselves before they kneel
their supplications into the earth. I crave the cleansing

of water, the answering of prayers. The last time I prayed
belongs to a past life. I am still finding my way there.

I am not saying I’m faithless—only that faith
has thinned in me. At a distance, a child prays,

bowl in hand, hoping to soothe the angry god
in his stomach. A pigeon sifts through debris,

wings trembling—even nature knows hunger. A goat
watches me, its gaze quiet, waiting. It prays my hand

doesn’t reach for a stone. Everything whispers one word:
survival. Even the lizard, darting toward a dead roach.

Even the silence—spread thin where birds should be.

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and a performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. His works have appeared in Chestnut Review, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, LOLWE, Strange Horizons, South Florida Poetry Journal, Ubwali Lit, ONE ART journal, Akpata Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column-NND, trampset, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Kayode Aderinokun Poetry Prize and the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for literature in 2025.