From & When We Get There Will We Have Been There Forever?

& When We Get There

Will We Have Been There Forever?

Ben Egerton

45.

Bradford-on-Avon, 2022

pool water has holes in its hands & feet
      I find a tear in its side      & scars on 

its brow & running the length of its spine  
   water thirsts      water cries      I’ve little doubt

of this      I’ve seen how water keeps the score

of ferries      cruise ships      & tugs      cross-hatching 
the harbour of the city where I live
      how those wounds on its skin stay long after 
traffic has docked or moved through the heads & 

out onto open sea      I wonder how 

many times they’ve drained & filled this pool since 
I was baptised here thirty-eight years ago
      & where my sins were washed away to      & 
how pools are vessels taking on water



This poem’s final line adapts a line from James Brown’s poem ‘Water Features’ from his 2022 collection The Tip Shop (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Press).

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Ben Egerton
Poet & Academic

Ben Egerton is a poet whose most recent collection is The Seed Drill (Kelsay, 2023). He teaches in the Faculty of Education at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Ben was Poet in Residence at the Rivendell Institute at Yale for the second half of 2024.

Photography by George Dagerotip