Crete: A family villanelle

The sun flashes pocket mirrors off the sea;
sweet, gritty coffee; cicadas; heat;
old stones; lost gods; ghosts and griefs.

The water smooth as liquid silk.
Jamie strikes out for the horizon.
The sun flashes pocket mirrors off the sea.

Icarus still hang-glides in the empyrean;
Theseus and Ariadne hurry down to the ships.
Old stones; lost gods; ghosts and griefs.

‘So,’ says Jessie, ‘what are the plans for the day?’
Scruff miaows; Scrap sidles; cats everywhere.
The sun flashes pocket mirrors off the sea.

Down here, the remains of a German plane;
up there, partisans and Kiwis hid out in the hills.
Old stones; lost gods; ghosts and griefs.

Bene wins every hand at O Hell.
Francis and Arya like the jet skiing best.
The sun flashes pocket mirrors off the sea.
Old stones; lost gods; ghosts and griefs.

Harry Ricketts

Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and 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). Recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). His two most recent books with Te Herenga Waka University Press are the memoir First Things (2024) and the poetry collection Bonfires on the Ice (2025).