'Your Secret Life 5'
(for Jessie)
Here’s your voice from across the world,
the kind of time you tend to call.
Still magic: “Hi Dad! How are you?”
You’re walking to the train. It’s cold.
Your voice breaks up, reassembles,
breaks up, reassembles again.
“Something important to tell you.”
As you talk, thirty years roll back,
telling my father the same thing.
“Are you quite sure?” I hear him ask.
Oh yes, quite sure. Sure then and now.
But you’ve missed your train; it must’ve left
early for once. That’s all you need.
You protest to the official,
prepare for coffee and your book.
No, here is your train, after all –
running late (leaves on the line?).
You’re aboard. You’ve started to move.
(Excerpted from Bonfires on the Ice, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025).
Harry Ricketts is a poet and scholar who has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent books include the poetry collections, Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021) and the memoir, First Things (2024). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024).
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