Pilgrim cry

Ezra Bature

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Ezra Bature

Tuesday 16 December 2025

Pilgrim cry

We speak from rooms with tired walls, from ceilings that drip promises, the rain never keeps.

Kaduna hears us
in Rigasa dust, in Barnawa nights,
in rent receipts folded like prayers.

Landlord, do you hear the cough of the house?
Its doors know hunger.
Its windows blink from sleeplessness.
We pay before we breathe,
before children learn their sums,
before light remembers our names.

Agent, you stand between roof and mercy, measuring shelter with profit’s ruler. You add years to rent
but subtract repairs from duty.
You knock only to collect,
never to ask if the house still lives.

They say, Pay two years.
They say, Pay three.
As if tomorrow is guaranteed,
as if salaries grow like neem trees,
as if survival is not already rent enough.

We are not refusing responsibility
we are refusing strangulation.
We are not asking for free rooms,
only fair ground to sleep on.

Kaduna sun already taxes us.
Fuel bites.
Food argues with the pocket.
Must shelter also become war?

Hear us before anger learns to shout.
Before families scatter like dust.
Before eviction becomes our only address.

We cry not against ownership,
but against forgetting humanity.
Let the house be shelter again,
not a weapon,
not a noose,
not a debt that wakes before dawn.

This is the voice of tenants
many mouths, one breath
asking for justice
to share a room with profit,
and let both survive.