Generations Past Poem by jan oskar hansen

Generations Past.


When I get up in summer nights air in the rooms
of my old cottage are dense with souls of those
who lived here before. As I stir the air they move
away they don’t see me but feel a presence that
they think of as a passing ghost.

Young souls are fearful but are told that ghost
means no harm to anyone and that is perhaps true.
Sometime I hear murmurs, voices of sorrow
but also of pleasure, it is life lived which unseen,
relive itself endlessly.

In autumns when the rooms get cold, in a home
made of stones, I light the fire the souls settle in
the wall behind the hearth and the cottage grows
silent as we wait for a new spring.