Apricot Press

Life after the Flood

By Khayelihle Benghu

After the flood,
we did not speak of miracles.

We spoke of mud
how it kept the shape of everything
we had lost.

Shoes half-buried,
photographs bled into colour,
a door unlearning its frame.

Still, we began again.

A broom against ruin,
a bucket passed hand to hand,
names carried across the wreckage
like fragile bridges.

Someone planted something
I don’t remember what
only the insistence of it

green against all that brown.

You said, it might not germinate.

I said nothing,
only pressed the soil down
as if it could hold a promise

neither of us
was ready to speak.

The Quiet Work of Seeds

By Khayelihle Benghu

No one sees the seed working.

There is no applause underground,
no witness to the slow splitting

the breaking that is not ruin
but instruction.

In darkness,
it learns the language of reaching.

Down first
roots before any thought of sky.

This is how it survives
by fastening itself
to what cannot be seen.

You, too, are becoming something
without evidence.

The waiting is not empty.

It is crowded with beginnings
you do not yet recognize.

One day,
there will be green

and you will call it sudden,
forgetting the long patience
that made it possible.

Photo credit: Dr Sourabh Panari