Forgotten Faces Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Forgotten faces

We only get one summer to remember,
the rest ends up in a blur.
This one had lasted long and the girl
I loved lived across the river, a beautiful little stream
that serenely floated down to meet its doom.
September, still summer though I knocked
a neighbour came, said she had gone abroad, a Dane.
Unseemly haste! I smiled, shrugged my shoulders,
women! And I suffered the longest night.
Daybreak brought a chill; dark clouds congregated it rained.
Years later I was in a bar in Copenhagen an old woman with too much makes up
on her haggard face, but those eyes, a memory stirred.
Her hands shook when pouring beer into my glass,
long nights, she said, and swiftly left, and a younger woman took her place.
I left too,
outside I looked up and saw
the curtain on the first-floor move;
those eyes.
I had seen them before but refused to remember.