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Darius Benhaim Poem
needs no introduction
nor permission
to be anything.
He does not request
to spread his arms wide
and reach the heavens.
His words are unmoored.
They flow and change,
remaking things
before the world sees them.
His hand—
a gesture suspended
by Gleti, between slumber
and the thing he covets.
His mother would make him go out
in the sun with calluses and dirt
under his nails, not the boy
who writes with nothing but air—
his imagination drifts
smoke that creeps, that wafts
through the darkness.
She can see his future only
in the toil of work where hands
are hardened by sweat
and men are measured in terms of muscle
not the gauge of their thoughts.
"I see no future in words,"
crusting like dry ground
won't shatter what it holds.
Notebooks in hand—if only she had an inkling
where he wandered, what he
wrote when the sky loomed patiently outside—
"You must be lost, son."
But he wasn't/isn't.
Not now.
The words are the map.
The ink, a compass.
The boy who writes is gone somewhere already.
She once set his notebooks aflame—
watching the flames tick
the pages like Shachath,
lived words lividly
tossed in nuggets of oak.
He sniffed at the fumes intentionally,
did not succumb.
Ashes did nothing—
they fell prey to the burdens
of his passion for release.
Meanwhile, his mother invoked the farm
as if it cut across her
and the earth pulsed in her veins,
calling for more than her hands could give.
But none of it reached him.
Not the scent of hay,
the dust stirred by the tractor’s turn—
weathered bones left
behind in the shed. She can't see
that it is not for him—
not for the boy who bends to the soil,
but for those who bend
as if the land owns them,
as if its thorns can hold them.
But the boy with the pen
is somewhere—
the dirt cannot touch,
somewhere—
the ink flows faster than
the creek he once skipped stones across.
His feet are compulsory,
made for roads not furrows;
his heart beats in cities
he has not yet seen—
spaces full of words
still seeking a place to be.
His mind does not
seek permission
nor does it trace any earth.
It flies,
like birds
unburdened
by weight of earth—
by laws of ground,
by sweat his mother
hopes will set him free.
She can't conceive
the scope of his mind—
how it glides over her,
over the trees,
over the weathered barn,
over the waiting fields;
silent but for the earth's slow hunger.
Her love has boundaries,
his words have none.
She used to question him,
"What will you be?"
He didn't reply.
Didn't have to.
He wrote. Words spinning
into tales only
he knew too intimately.
He writes of those
who are not able to write—the ones still
waiting to breathe outside
what they were born with.
Of the world
as it will be one day—
the world everyone waits for.
He writes
because it is the only means
he can be both earth and air,
the man and the boy,
the seed and the fire
that will one day consume all.
The boy writes alone,
not because he is running
but because he knows the world
has yet to see him.
And when it does—
when it finally sees him,
it will be in a language
he has forged from coal and guts
and tears and the inevitable
space where thoughts are born
before the world can name them.
He writes because, in the end,
his words will build the place
he has never been allowed to walk in.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2025
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Darius Benhaim Poem
In a weightless state of tranquility,
paraphrasing relentless thoughts of motion
in my head into words, which 'til now
have laid dormant in unsung verse, waiting
for you to shine brightly upon them.
Freshly painted impressions mark
the beginning of halcyon days, where gulls
hover just above waves that barely
kiss the shoreline, burying tiny toes
beneath the coolness of wet beached sand.
To what shall we compare thee or can
your effulgent beauty be measured
by metered stanzas of verse taking form
on rice paper and egg shells so that the yolk
slips out draining lucent into the earth's core.
Your wisdom surveys the high seas,
coursing through cavernous veins that harbor
quietly in safety channels, as zephyrs
challenge moist underbrush among youthful
lips, blowing innocent kisses in playful semblance.
Oscines sway in sync beneath heaven's domain,
bathing in rays of sweet luminosity,
as sun-drenched fossils rise, reborn,
reclaiming their gaiety to shine unobstructed,
teething along crevasses of incandescence.
Embrace these Sun days, reflecting
on fireside chats and old storybooks,
reciting euphonious tales that burn mellow,
rising to greet the eyes of omnipotence
with chants of celestial song and dance.
And to this place we call rapture,
let wings of sober doctrine reveal
where grace resides within Sol's castle,
waiting for the children to come forth
with clasped hands in joyful unison.
Such days will greet warmth openly,
without hesitation, so the orbiting
star becomes ever more pliant,
allowing whatever name you choose
to objectify it, to stand always...
Bright, within itself.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2024
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Darius Benhaim Poem
Unable to sleep or pray, I stand
by the window looking out—
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.
White Oaks and Maples concede
beneath the crystalline weight,
their branches falling brittle upon
a frozen tableau of memory.
Love—that old revolutionary road,
veers sideways toward scrutiny;
where I've wandered, reliving moments
at the long junction of unease.
But make no mistake—
The trees themselves, as in winters past
will endure their burdening; broken thrive.
Am I less to You, my God, than they?
What does this have to do with love?
I shatter a mirror just to glimpse
the shifting umbra that lurks behind,
searching for the source of wholeness.
I hear it—the mutability of love in stead,
its voice, cutting a swath through leavings;
worn, blessed, shaped by earth
while rising out of what was lost.
I pull thread by thread, at memories lost,
as if to weave them back together;
but each attempt reveals the tear
in every promise once coveted.
Is love then, nothing but a gap—
a space we fill with longing,
a promiscuous fire lost in the cold
leaving us searching for its light?
The trees, staunch, their silence deep,
and in their forboding, I see more
than in the frantic rush of hearts—
they bend and splinter yet carry forth.
Love is not the comfort we expect,
rather the oscillating tension
that reveals even in ruination, there
is life's will stirring in the dark.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2024
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Darius Benhaim Poem
It starts in silence.
Deep down.
Where listening lives.
Not words—
older.
Older than moons wept for their orbit.
She stands.
No mask.
No shield.
The world draws—
at her edges.
And she…
glows.
Shimmers to the slow whisper of tide,
to the hush calling for motion.
She IS motion.
A drip of sun on glass.
The hush of time
on a once-sharp stone.
She is not the chisel—
She is the hand.
The one that stays.
That forgives the shaping.
She moves…
and the world remembers.
Look at her.
See how she folds
into the curve of living.
Notice how the moon
spills silver
at her feet—
a secret
not secret at all.
She does not disappear.
She be-comes.
She warps gravity—makes it gentle.
Softens the sharp.
Tells the story of passing through.
The world is not vacant.
It anticipates.
Contains the not-yet.
Provides space for the arriving.
Soft things survive.
Not by volition.
Not by designation.
And when she breaks—
she does not b
r
e
a
k.
She leans
until the edge…
learns to yield.
No splinter.
Only rewrite.
She doesn't crush—
She s m o o t h s.
She instructs the solid
to shift.
She becomes the line
between sky and sea—
the hands that move the light.
No end.
Only motion.
No limit.
Only stretch.
To yield
is to know what comes next.
To break—
is to bloom.
Light seeps through every crack she leaves—
spills its soft insistence,
a gift.
She makes abundance
from absence.
She holds the unholdable.
She calls it—
grace.
She is the hush
before the quake.
The breath
of wet stone.
The mirror
in the sky’s long stare.
She is all of it—
the tremble,
the hush,
the quiet power
remaking the world.
Call her nothing.
Call her hymn.
Call her motion.
Watch her move—
unseen.
Unheard.
The quiet force.
The current beneath.
Rebuilding the world.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2025
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Darius Benhaim Poem
To be clear...
I’m not asking you to love this.
I’m asking for you to meet me
where the words land hard—
where syllables ignite
like the last coin
burning a hole into your palm—
spent, but still cursing
what you could’ve claimed,
what you’re still pretending to chase.
I know...
you didn’t ask for this.
The ink staining your thoughts
like the memory of a tattoo gone bad—
the weight of metaphor,
that friend who never knows when its time
to leave even after you’ve abruptly shut the door.
I’m not here to make you believe
in anything more than the obvious:
the moon still shows up unabated,
the sun fades to an overhyped memory,
the world keeps spinning
because who needs a break, right?
However...
allow me to offer a word,
dew tap-dancing sweetness
against humbled slabs of rubble—
the way it burns like
that spliff smoked
in the backseat of a car
with no apparent destination.
You don’t need to love it—
I’m not asking for your devotion
just your pause,
your ear tilted toward the rung
of what might mean more
than either of us can say.
I’m not here to sell you
on the holiness of rhyme,
or to argue that a line can be
both prayer and weapon—
something churning in your soul
as you disappear into a crowd
too loud to notice.
I only want you to see
how language, this worn & battered thing
is the closest we’ll ever get
to a mystery worth chasing.
It won’t show up in the ding of a text,
or tucked between constant notifications
buzzing like mosquitoes
too thirsty to leave you alone.
This talk won’t beg your consent
only your presence.
It hangs in the air
like incense refusing
to dissipate from sheer obstinacy.
You’ve spent too long
bulldozing its remains,
lost in the whirl of your own doubts.
So let’s meet—
in the space where words
aren’t source guides or Google maps
but the body’s struggle to speak;
the pulse you feel in your fingertips
blushing on the page.
I don’t need you to love this,
but I can show you how a sentence
becomes a river you never meant to cross
but can’t seem to stop wading through—
how it pulls you under
and still,
somehow
manages to let you breathe.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2025
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Darius Benhaim Poem
It seems,
I’ve spent my better days tangled in dreams,
where your voice resonates as a symphony,
your eyes the beams of a thousand sunsets,
a canvas painted in hues of angst.
You,
a constellation I can never reach,
stars shimmering in a sky not mine.
I’ve traced your outline in forgotten shadows,
whispered confessions of longing to the wind,
hoping it would carry my heart to you.
Even now, in unsettled silence,
your absence roars,
a lioness in the pit of my loins,
devouring the light,
leaving me weightless and hollow.
Every word I speak is a hymn to you,
a prayer cast into the abyss.
You, the deity of my desires,
etched in stoicism,
an echo that journeys, but never returns.
I've watched you from afar,
a patron viewing silent films,
your laughter, a melody that teases,
your touch, a ghost haunting me from within.
I am the gifted book you’ll never read,
a borrowed story gathering dust on an empty shelf.
I’ve written you in a thousand poems,
each line chiseled from the stone of my soul,
fragments now lost in the ether of time.
Still, you are the comet blazing through my sky,
too bright to hold, too fleeting to grasp.
The barren field of unrequited love—
a garden that never blooms,
a river that fails to reach the sea.
Though bent and weathered, I stand, resolutely,
a shipwreck caught in your storm,
desperately clinging to the hope
of a rescue I know will never come.
You are my beautiful disaster,
my exquisite pain—
a wound I tend with reverence
knowing it will never heal, yet cherishing the ache.
So here I remain, trapped behind a moon
that yearns endlessly for the sun—
doting over flickers of your light,
destined to burn outside the circle of your brilliance,
across timeless voids—chasing an eternal flame
that still insists... you are mine.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2024
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Darius Benhaim Poem
Sweet mother, Virginia Slim wedged between your fingers,
that last light willed to die at the rig
of a darkened room.
You—half-goddess, half-ghost, pinioned in some still-life setting
of tumbled smoke and silver hair.
I’d always thought the air around your form was tilted at some aberrant angle,
the world unaligned with your shape.
You are the kind of woman who can hold grief in the palm
of her hands without spilling over. That's the thing
about loads—they're never really lost. Cigarette smoke curled up, a ribbon
unwound into the stratosphere of your apartment-like space—
a good dream that doesn't know how to wake.
I remember how last week's dinner lingered in the kitchen,
the sound of silver on porcelain—
all that clatter, all that chatter,
as we dined neatly on stowed secrets.
You and I, we knew how to swallow the things
that couldn't be said—
at tables, where we could taste the heft of our lives
while never letting it touch our tongues.
I caught the way you flicked your cigarette
into the heat of the pavement,
as though casting off some part of you
we were never meant to see.
That’s what people do, right?
Leave their burdens on sidewalks,
let them burn underfoot,
pretend the world won’t notice.
You taught me that—
how to parse the heavy parts
where no one will care.
On our way to dine, the smell of food half-remembered—
the mess of dinners that never felt like a feast
but always promised to fill us up.
There was nothing about those meals that spoke to the hunger
and still, we ate because that’s what folks do:
they feed themselves with what they have
whether it’s enough or not.
You tapped your cigarette
against the ground and I thought...
there are places with no ashtrays
that will always have room for bad habits.
I wanted to ask why
but sometimes, there's no need to ask a question
when deep down you know the answer.
Once, I felt sure you were humming—
something low and uneven,
a tune that could’ve been a lullaby
had it not been cradled on sharp edges.
Was it for me?
For someone I’ve never met but whose name
still stains your voice?
Or was it for yourself—
a small, deliberate kindness
you learned to give when no one else would?
That’s something I never reconciled—
the music you made in a silence I couldn’t reach.
And the keys, jingling in your purse
as you walk like you’re still twenty,
still burning through life like a short fuse—
I wondered what they were for, those years
of keys heavy with memories never asked for.
What doors do they open,
what rooms you never let me in?
But I already knew—
you were the door
and the key was never meant for me.
I didn’t ask you,
but maybe I should’ve.
Maybe I could’ve
but the waitress came with her notepad and a smile
and we were too busy pretending we weren’t both
older than we used to be.
Still, you could finish a plate like you never
spent a day hungry,
wearing your age like something
you borrowed just yesterday—temporary as
smoke escaping those midling chimney stacks.
And in that quiet of us eating—
the cigarette, the keys,
I could hear the sound of you
walking out of your past
though not quite leaving it.
I left a tip.
We stepped back into the world
like we were never meant to be here anyway.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2025
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Darius Benhaim Poem
Amassed in tiny
droplets formed
on a windowsill
like virgin tears
of perfection...
the night-bird's
rendition of summer
rain behind the backdrop
of a trumpeter's smooth
grooves melting beneath
the warmth of
the enveloping sun.
That was when she
drifted in, unassuming
under a breeze
of melodic waves
like corners turn,
sharp and definitive
as a baby clef on
the musician's highest
notes shouting
I Wanna Take You HIGHER...
perfectly stained
on a sheet
tentatively titled
the Color of Eve.
Poised upon feathers
of song subdued
in blues she consumes
the world around her,
spiraling between
mellifluous rhythms
that sway her mind
where her body
dares not go...
there, soulful nectar
drips from her
brow as the sun
momentarily rests before
draping her in
a palette of warm
sensations under dusk's
lyrical awakening.
Her eyelids close
as she arches
back to feel
the cool sound
around her, becoming
conjoined within
it's many moods
of blues and hues
a denizen of
the moment embraced...
emitting a scent
so sweet
that by dawn
she leaves behind
a confectionery trail
of perfect notes.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2024
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Darius Benhaim Poem
...after Gwendolyn Brooks & Terrance Hayes
In this dim-lit hall, gathered close, we
Chalk our cues, faces worn but real.
Eight-ball in the corner, staying cool,
Brothers in the game, that's who we
Are. Schoolyard dreams we long since left,
Traded books for pool cues after school.
In this smoky haven loitering, here we
Find our place, amongst shadows we lurk
Quiet-like. Clock ticking, hour grows late,
But time don't matter much when we
Line up shots, aiming for that strike,
Playing it cool, playing it straight.
'Round the table, huddled close, we
Share our stories, raspy voices sing
Of life's hard knocks, fleeting joy, hidden sin.
In felt-green world, for now we're free, we
Hold on tight, though hope grows thin.
Raise our glasses, cheap whiskey, no gin,
To friendship lasting. Together, we
Make our music, spinning pool hall jazz.
Summer's ending, farewell to June,
We play on still, knowing in short time, we
Might not be here, where dreams can die,
Our final game coming too soon.
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2024
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Darius Benhaim Poem
I wonder if Pops will lie out in his trademark bell-bottoms—faded denim flares that split the air like his cool, bending time, making room for his strut as if the horizon would yield to his next step.
He sported them tightly creased—dividing time into his own image and fashioning it into a tailored jacket. Double-breasted pinstripe blazer, a jazz-filled dream, every stitch belting out the bridge of a Wednesday night 12-inch serenade.
This walking storehouse of juke joints, Motown discs and blaxploitation films, disturbing memories the way vinyl records scrape like grooves—deep enough to envelop the sun. Maybe that's why he was always sleeping with an afro pick stuck in the crown of his hair—an Israelite warrior anchored to the ground in his mane.
Real talk, he kinda reminded me of Mr. Soul Train—swagger oozing from platform heels like honeycombs, a disco dancing machine of something more memorable than the slow curve of a woman's hips. Moonwalking across the kitchen floor, stirring the stars with a spin, kissing wax.
"Ice cream man, ice cream man—I need a quarter real bad to buy the fine shorty down the block one of them sun-kissed dreamsicles with a smile to match." In my head, I call her baby-girl, and when she catches sight of me she blushes... in my head.
My sister burned the grits this morning and I was hella mad. Okay, I’m frontin’—I’m still mad. I’ll bet Mama’s hot comb and my new Sunday loafers she did it on purpose—shaming her own canvas like a maestro just to see if the mess bloomed to beauty. She's been grounded for three days, but still pitches fits like seeds, observing what kind of anarchy sprouts from rebellion.
Mama just told me, "Boy, let it go"—but how do you let go of burnt grits? Of a sister with the face of a permanent-marker grin? I’d give her the silent treatment, but she'd jam it full of smugness, mocking my rebuke like Double-Dutch ropes skipping rhymes: "Down in the alley where the garbage grows..."
Pops would call this a teachable moment. "Life's like a pot of grits—you gotta stir it just right or it'll stick to the bottom." Then he'd slap me on the shoulder with aftershave and talcum powder scented hands, leaving the smell of him on my skin, like a paternal signature.
Later, I’ll practice my two-step in the driveway, fingers crossed that baby-girl walks by. I’ll spin imaginary records in my head: James Brown for the rhythm, Marvin Gaye for the soul. If she smiles, I’ll c-walk like Pops, dancing on the tightrope of cool and catastrophe.
Inside, my sister mutters vengeance under her breath—steam from the boiling kettle rising like a menace, a haze thick as the dough outside: bell-bottom jeans swish then sway, ice cream trucks blast their hypnotic melodies, and me—stuck between a dream and the long, slow simmer of a comeback.
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This poem originally appeared in African Writer Magazine - 2025 - DJB
Copyright © Darius Benhaim | Year Posted 2025
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