The New Knowledge Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Early September, days are getting shorter and evenings longer;
the breeze that blew had pockets of cold air, a reminder of
things to come. Dawn when I got up looked into the mirror
and saw my father’s aged face. Lucid now and for once fully
conscious I had been asleep for forty years and lost the time
between youth and old age. In a foreign country and I could
no longer remember how I got here, or how to leave.
I pressed fingers to my cheeks, in quiet despair, finger marks
on inelastic skin that only slowly faded. Father, why did you
let me sleep so long, how can I now recapture my adult years?
A rumbling through the house, a picture in the living room
fell off the wall; it was of my mother and she looked so young.
The intensity of my reawaken consciousness overwhelmed me,
walls fell and naked I stood in the ruins of my unlived life