The Awareness Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

The Awareness

As the days of light draw in I’m pulled
back to a mythical past, and I remember
a perfect moment, when time stood still
and we’re a contented family.

An alarm clock rang, a shift worker had
to get up, do his job, a summer evening
that would never return when nature
and humanity were as one

No one remember them now, traceless
but for a box of old photos in the drawer,
bones that rattle in the night; the expanse
between us is unbridgeable now

As the memory fades into a shadow
and faces are hidden in a miasma of time,
there is in the vanishing light a beacon
that still shines till my journeying ends.