Foreign Country Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

A foreign country

The flat was on the third floor, three flights of wooden stairs
deep groves from generation of people walking up and down.
In the living room I sat down. Had been away for long no one at
home. The autumn wind blew, the house swayed and creaked
like an old schooner meeting the Atlantic swells.

A simple living room, a few family pictures and an amateur
painting of a row boat in a fjord, boathouse, blue sky and sea,
a far hazy silhouette of a mountain range. The painting was
ominous by its deadness. I got up went down the same stairs;
I had entered, the past and those I knew had gone.