Dry Veins is a poem written by Siwaphiwe Matha, a fifteen-year-old poet from South Africa whose voice carries the weight of lived truth. Rooted in the reality of growing up without a father in South Africa – where the ‘absent father’ has become so commonplace it has been folded into silence – this poem refuses that silence. There is no performance of grief here. There is only excavation. This is not simply a poem about abandonment. It is a reckoning with blood, with belonging, and with the complicated grace of a heart that still, despite everything, leaves the door open. Dry Veins asks the questions that children are told not to ask. It sits with the answers that never come. And in doing so, it opens a conversation that South African society – and families across the world – urgently needs to have. In the tradition of Poets and Peace, Dry Veins reminds us that healing begins not with forgetting, but with the bravery to speak – and the grace to be heard.
Dry Veins
You share my blood
Yet you know not my name
It is such a shame
that I crave a moment within your touch.
I crave affection,
yet not so much,
because of the strain in my blood.
You demand for answers
while I, not knowing
If one of you might love –
It is such a shame,
Knowing that with you,
I am not the only one.
“Abandoned”
A word that never slips my tongue.
From when I was young
It was embedded in my veins.
“Absent”
A word they would use to describe you,
While I sit in my garden yard and ask:
Do I, the loner, need some closure?
I grew up near the dream-coated miracle,
Hoping for your return
But similar to the one with no hope,
My heart felt cold.
Do I, the one with figures trapped in ghosts,
Need shelter from the ones who are close?
Does regret knock on your door
As you imagine
My laughter, held by thorns?
Should I be happy regarding your return?
Smile, laugh in shreds,
Act like you never left?
Am I ungrateful?
Or is that just all in my head?
Thinking of you makes me so sad —
So I will just get some rest.
Poet Details
Siwaphiwe Matha,
15 Years Old
South Africa