Khayelihle Benghu: 4 Poems

The House That Wouldn’t Stay

I was twelve when words became a shelter,
a room no one could evict me from.
Divorce scattered us like papers in wind,
and every move was another erasure
walls painted over, doors closing too soon.

I wrote to survive the shifting ground,
to name the ache that followed me
from one rented corner to the next.
But the computer was stolen,
and with it, the archive of my childhood
every poem a small lantern,
extinguished in a stranger’s hands.

Still, the body remembers.
Displacement is a second skin,
mental storms a weather I carry.
And so I write again,
not to recover what was lost,
but to prove that even theft
cannot silence the pulse of survival.

The Hole Like Mine

The hole in the oak tree is dark
a wound blackened to charcoal,
scorched bark curling like a scream
that never left her mouth.

I wonder if she felt it
the chisels of the wood-gatherers
piercing her spine,
the slow burn of her heart
traded for warmth
she would never feel.

Did she know
she was being used?
That her silence
was mistaken for consent?

Still, she stands.
Not untouched,
but unbroken.
Her limbs cradle the sky
like a mother who forgives
what she cannot forget.

In the hollow they carved,
a squirrel builds its home.
Tiny paws pat down the grief,
line it with leaves,
make it soft enough
to raise something new.

She holds them gently
the way no one held her.
Her roots deep in the earth,
her branches open to the wind,
she becomes sanctuary
in spite of what was taken.

And I
I press my palm to her bark,
feel the echo of my own hollow,
and wonder
if healing means
learning to shelter others
with the part of you
that hurt the most.

What the Body Refuses to Forget

The mind lets go first.
The body is slower,
more loyal to truth.
It remembers the room temperature
of grief,
the exact weight of fear
on the chest.
Time asks the body to move on.
The body asks time
to stop lying.
Every ache is a document.
Every tremor, a date.
Healing doesn’t erase the archive
it teaches us
how to read it without bleeding.

Childhood Writes to the Future, and the Future Echoes Back in Colours

I was small,
but my words reached forward
scribbled notes folded into the pockets of time.
I asked the future:
Will you be kind?
Will you remember me?

The future answered not in letters,
but in colours:
blue for the days I learned to breathe again,
green for the gardens I thought I’d lost,
gold for the laughter that returned like sunrise,
red for the scars that healed into stories.

Childhood wrote in pencil,
erasable, trembling.
The future replied in paint,
bold strokes across the canvas of my skin.

And now I stand between them
the child with questions,
the future with colours
my body the bridge,
my voice the echo.

Khayelihle Benghu is an emerging poet based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some of her work has appeared in Person of Interest and Ake Review.