Jan Oskar Hansen Poems

Haiti

A heap of bodies a humid, tree less killing field?
Raw unrestricted pictures, it is like being awake
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Greetings

The lone star beer was ice cold, turned my teeth into
glaziers. My mind froze as polar bears hunted seals
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Tanka (The sigh)

The Palestinians
Are my beloved cousins
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What a Priest told me.
I was young, fourteen, late at night, I was hasting home, jumped over fences,
crossed a garden when I saw a naked woman by the fireside, wood fire casted
a warm glow on her body, washing herself with a cloth she dipped into a sink
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The Stalker

Liverpool 1974 and it wasn’t raining, sat in a café, at the pedestrian precinct,
the coffee was awful, tasted like milky tea, when I saw her. She was daintily
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Dear Raman, so you want me to read your poem and state my opinion.
Well, you are fond of words and you are stacking them up in your poem.
That is a good thing; clearly you are a man who reads a lot.
So you want to be a poet, poetry is self indulgent’ it never starts a war
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Letter to a young Poet

Dear Raman, so you want me to read your poem and state my opinion.
Well, you are fond of words and you are stacking them up in your poem.
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The Doll
When mum went to work at the fish factory, there was no
money for baby-sitters; she gave me a black rag doll, to play
with. The doll, called Tom, was a caricature and today would
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Winter-light
No one walks on the old road anymore, not even on a day
when almond trees are in bloom. Blue weed and thorny
bushes are shooting through, one day the road will be out
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The Exile.

You can’t leave this town for the next six years, the magistrate had said.
Rang my house, no one there, I wanted someone to send for my dog so
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