Distant Country (Rewrite) Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Distant country


The flat was on the third floor, flights of wooden stairs
deep groves from generations of people going up and down
in the living room, I sat down, had been away too long.
The autumn wind blew, the house swayed and creaked
like an old schooner meeting the Atlantic swells.

The room was simple, a few pictures and an Amateur
painting of a rowboat in a fiord, a boathouse and blue sky
afar the silhouette of a mountain range, the painting was
ominous by its deadness; got up went down the same stairs
I entered; the past and those I knew had gone.