Meeting A Friend Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Meeting a Friend
I met my old friend Joao at the pharmacist today
a place we old ones go to buy medicine and to
meet friends still alive, it occurred to me the pharmacy
and the cemetery is only five minutes, walk away
from each other. Joao had gone thin he used to be
a house builder with a big muscular frame and now
before me an old man who had lost his ready smile
and a funny riposte to any argument.

But I saw something else in his eyes, a dread, it was
as he realised the finality of his life, a pleading to
to nature that he was the one who escaped to
the paradise island where the word death does not
exist in the local language of the tribe who live there,
but there was no succour; he had lost the battle.