If I Were A Bard Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

If I were a young Bard.

I wrote my first poem when I was about 13.I was taking a short cut home
when I saw a woman washing her herself by the fire place, few people in
those days had a bathroom. I was so enthralled by this that I wrote a poem.
My older brother found it, gave my ode to my mother, who said I was a pig.
This shocked me so much that I never wrote another poem before I was fifty
one. But all the poems I didn’t write came tumbling out it was like they had
been filed in my head waiting for me to pick up a pen. This particular well is
empty, the poems I write now are contemporary. I have a collection of
verses, edited by a friend of mine “The Tasmanian Tiger” when settlers came
to Tasmania they eradicated that animal, it will never come back and that
saddens me deeply. In Norway we very nearly killed off the wolf, my inner
ear can hear them, in a snowbound dale them when the moon is full and
I too can howl to a mythical past; a longing for harmony in a cruel world.