What we owe one another

Two Poems on Help, Shelter and Dignity

Two poems consider what happens to dignity when circumstance makes us dependent on the kindness of others.

There are moments when self-sufficiency becomes impossible. You are out of money, out of ideas, and someone else must now open a door or window for you. These benevolence of other, becomes the difference between continuing and stopping.

Dependence creates its own kind of vulnerability because the person who provides help also acquires, however briefly, a measure of power.

That power can preserve another person’s dignity or diminish it.
These two poems approach that experience from opposite directions. The first remembers kindness that became a bridge. The second remembers shelter that came without the dignity a home should offer. This is the question they leave us with: when another person’s vulnerability places some measure of power in our hands, what do we do with it?

THE FRIEND WHO HELD THE LIGHT

My final year arrived with a price tag
I could barely look at without fear.
My project stood before me, almost finished,
yet money had become the locked door
between effort and completion.

I had already poured hours into it,
dreams into it, pieces of myself into it.
The thought of stopping there
felt like watching a house collapse
after you had laid its final brick.

I wondered whether years of work
could end at the edge of an empty pocket.
The thought hurt differently,
because failure was not the only fear.
Waste was.

Then a friend reached out a hand
when mine had begun to fall.
No trumpet announced the kindness,
no crowd gathered to witness it,
but that gesture became a bridge.

Sometimes help does not arrive
as a miracle wrapped in light.
Sometimes it comes quietly,
through one person who says,
“Let me help you finish.”

I learned that resilience is sometimes borrowed
until you can grow your own.
And when I finally stood again,
I carried more than gratitude.
I carried a promise to keep going.
Kindness is easiest to recognise when we are the ones receiving it. Its deeper test comes when another person must depend on us.

A ROOM THAT TAUGHT ME KINDNESS

I once slept beneath another person’s roof
and learned how quickly shelter can become shame.

The walls were standing,
but I never truly felt at home,
because kindness had been left outside the door.

There is a particular loneliness
in being somewhere you are not wanted.
You learn to fold your presence smaller,
to make your footsteps quieter,
to apologise for taking up space.

I remember measuring my movements,
wondering whether simple existence
was already asking for too much.

A roof should protect the body,
but what protects the heart beneath it?

I learned then that dependence
can make a person swallow words
they should have been allowed to speak.

Gratitude can become complicated
when kindness comes with humiliation attached.
I remember that feeling,
the helplessness of needing what someone else controls.

It taught me that a room is not enough.
A home must have dignity in it,
or it becomes another kind of cage.

So I made a promise to my future self:
whoever sleeps beneath my roof
will never have to earn the right to feel human.

If I have space,
I will make room.

About the poet

Olatinwo Yushau is a poet, performer and author whose work explores survival, resilience and human responses to adversity. He is the author of Broken Roads Still Lead Forward. His writing and performance work has appeared on platforms including Nigerian Tribune, Upwrite Magazine and Poetreel.com, and he has performed on poetry and literary stages in London and Bristol.