My father was a river.
This is how I was told to introduce myself.
His waters carried villages, fed the fields, remembered the dead.
My mother said I was born with river-silt beneath my tongue.
When I disappeared, they searched the banks.
They found only my sandals.
Years passed.
Then, one morning, I returned.
The village gathered.
Children touched my hands.
The elders asked where I had been.
I said nothing.
They asked my father to rise behind me.
But the river stayed still.
No silver fish, no sudden rain.
No voice beneath the current.
Only silence.
That was when they noticed what I had carried home.
A small black stone resting beneath my tongue.
I placed it in the river and the water recoiled.
The river had forgotten me, or perhaps I had forgotten it.
I walked away before anyone could ask
which of us was the ghost.
Behind me, the river began flowing backward.
Toward the place where I had been born.
Toward the place where something was waiting.
Bio
Khayelihle Benghu is a South African poet and writer whose work often explores myth, memory, ancestry, and the uncanny. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in publications including Star*Line, Solarpunk Magazine, Consequence, Mslexia, Aloka, Person of Interest, Decolonial Passage, AKE Review, and Metphrastics. She is the author of The Names We Carry. Her work is particularly interested in the places where inherited stories, ordinary lives, and the supernatural meet.
Author's note
“The Daughter of the River God Returns Without Water” grew out of my fascination with myths and the stories people inherit about gods, ancestors, rivers, and the unseen world.
I’m drawn to the way myths can survive for generations while still leaving certain voices unheard. In my own retellings, I often find myself wondering what happens when the woman at the centre of an old story is finally allowed to speak for herself.
With this poem, I wanted to imagine a daughter who disappears and returns changed, carrying something that the river itself can no longer recognise. The river is both father and ancestral presence, while her return raises the question of whether belonging can survive when a person has crossed into a place beyond the understanding of those who remember her.
The poem is part of my wider fascination with revisiting myths, not to replace the stories we inherit, but to listen for the voices that may have been hidden inside them.
