Green Hills Of Home Poem by jan oskar hansen

Vast grassland rolling hills and a river that has trout
that taste of mud, and one only fry and eat when
hungry. Only one tree here, it’s petrified and white
as a skeleton left out in the rain, (it was an apple tree)
yet this place used to be a forest, in the days when
a horse was no bigger than a poodle, but we don’t
how big a poodle was; maybe the size of a mastodon,
in that case horses were of the same size then as now.

There are more animals here, white fleeced sheep
occupying hilltops, safer that way. There are people
too, but they live underground there has been
a war on and survivors suffer from trench syndrome;
they do come out at night and tend to their animals.
There is something sad about a landscape without
cottages, chimney smoke, a smithy’s anvil clank and
the hiss of a horse shoe dipped in cooling in water