As The Year Ends Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

As the Old Year Ends


This evening, the penultimate before New Year eve, I look out of the window
see an empty village road drying after rain. A lone outdoor lamp casts a bleak
illumination of houses gone grey by continuous precipitations; total darkness
would have been more merciful. Shuttered windows, silent despair every little
family cocooned in their own misery, but it is what they know and incestuous
are their dreams. An abject wind blows tries to make dead leaves and cigarette
butts dance for the sake of ennui. But then the wind dies too into a blanket of
unseen gloom of nothingness. The big Eve tomorrow, there will be dancing,
hilarity and music, but above all clamor a voice will whisper: “What is it all for? ”