Khayelihle Benghu resides in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been writing since 2008. Besides writing, she has a heart for photography, mainly nature.

Describe your ekphrastic process. Do you have a favorite prompt or way in?

I begin with atmosphere. I let the artwork speak in silence first: what emotion does it stir before I name it? I often write in response to visual textures, shadow, gesture, the tension between stillness and movement. My favourite way in is to imagine the artwork as a threshold. What memory or myth might step through it if I waited long enough? Sometimes I write from the perspective of an object within the piece, or I let the silence around it become the poem’s voice.

What attracts you to a work for ekphrasis? How do you know you have a good subject?

I’m drawn to works that feel emotionally charged but slightly elusive, where something is withheld. A good subject for me is one that resists immediate interpretation. If I find myself returning to it days later, still haunted or curious, I know it’s asking to be written into.

You're based in South Africa. How do you engage with works of art at the Met? Do you often go to the website? How much is the Met on the radar of poets and artists in your area?

Yes, I engage with the Met almost entirely online through its digital collections. The accessibility of its archives has been a gift. While the Met isn’t always top of mind in local circles, there’s growing interest in global artistic dialogue, especially among emerging poets and interdisciplinary artists. For me, the Met is a kind of portal one that allows me to explore cultural echoes and aesthetic tensions across time and geography.

Do you have a favorite piece of art at the Met?

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David. The emotional restraint, the moral weight, the quiet defiance it’s a painting that feels like a poem waiting to be unravelled. I’m also drawn to the Met’s African art collection, especially pieces that evoke ritual, ancestry, and transformation.

Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem?

Brenda Hillman’s “The Cliffrose and the Desert Rose” comes to mind not strictly ekphrastic, but it engages with landscape as art. I also admire Rita Dove’s “Lady Freedom Among Us” for how it animates a statue into a living, breathing presence.

What excites you about the Metphrastics project?

The invitation to respond across distance to let art and poetry speak to each other across continents and contexts is deeply moving. Metphrastics feels like a kind of sanctuary, where poets can gather around shared wonder and make something new from it. I’m excited by the possibility of dialogue, between image and word, between artists and readers, between past and present.