Loss Of Innocence Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

The Loss of Innocence

At a school sports day I was running 60 metres,
I wanted so very much to win, could taste blood
didn´t quite make it but got a bronze medal,
which I wore on my lapel with pride.

When I joined the merchant navy and when going ashore
I wore it too; no one else had a medal like me.
Girls in bars admired it and wanted to know why I had
such a splendid medal. I could not tell the mundane truth
being a compulsive story teller I spun a tale.

Alas, women are destroyers of young men’s pride they want
to possess what they can´t have.
It was in Le Havre I met my downfall, she promised me
heavenly delight for the medal, and I succumbed; the delight
lasted a few minutes and my medal was forever lost.