Woodland Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Horrified Woodland

In the forest of bamboo poles walked it was hot and
I felt like a lost ant not remembering where its hill was.
I tried to pull up a bamboo pole I remembered that
as a boy I had a rattan fishing rod,
but could not, and it didn´t mattered I wasn´t
going to fish anything anymore. The panda likes bamboo shoots.
I used to go fishing in the stream on
Summer evenings and when I caught some
the farmer´s wife fried them in butter... delicious...
The stream is not there any longer, a beauty that was a hindrance
to progress
in the forest of canes I saw hyenas catching a baby elephant and
eating of it before it was dead.
The real thing not Disneyland with mechanical crocodiles and happy
ducks dressed as sailors.
It strikes me, here in the forest of oversized wicker baskets,
that death is of no concern to the dead,
and that fat corpses will in time be slim, but that is of no concern to
the living.