Jan Oskar Hansen,
PT
The
Musical Lady
I know of a
pavement café where tables and chairs are painted
in different colours to lend ambience in an otherwise
dreary street.
A young lady, a student at the music conservatorium,
comes
here for lunch and always insists on sitting on the same
chair,
a rosa one; she is pretty in a stern way—long
black dress, flat shoes,
plain long hair and big glasses—waiters
are happy to oblige her.
This causes jealousy among the other chairs that want
her to sit on
them too. In the night they gang up on the rosa one,
up-end it
and badly scratch it. The owner, thinking it was the
work of vandals,
puts the damage chair in the store room, but when the
musical lady
comes to lunch she insists to sit on her chair damaged
or not.
Other seats feel bad realizing it was not the rosa
chair’s fault but the idiosyncrasy of the artist, so in
the night they spruce up the rosa chair so it looks like
new. But now the pianist doesn't want it—
not the same as
before, she says and sits on a yellow chair.
Feeling miffed the gleaming new looking seat says to
itself:
"No big shake she has a narrow, cold bum anyway.”
Benafim
and Thereabout (Algarve, Portugal)
The road I
walk on is flanked by old stone walls, in fact, the
scenery
is crossed by these walls but most of them have fallen
down by now,
and behind the walls—almond
trees. I can’t think of anything uglier
than these trees—grey,
spindly with a few nuts hanging here and there
like discarded Christmas decor of yesteryear. But come
February I will
wake up to a beautiful sight—the
almond trees will be full of pink and
white flowers, which they shed, petal by petal, fooling
us to think it
snows in fairyland. Then it will be full of vivid green
leaves, not drab
green like olive trees, but verdant as a woman’s dress
when going to
a new year ball. This landscape has not seen war for
eons—dictators,
presidents and generals have ruled and gone; they never
came here
where the land has nothing to offer but beauty. But if
you listen well
to nature’s murmour, you can hear an echo from an unseen
minaret,
an Imam’s melodious voice calling the faithful to
prayer.
Free at
Last
The old urn
On my mantelpiece
Dusty now
Name erased
One day I opened its lid
A scream escaped
New
Year 2012
Last year’s
New Year bash in the ballroom at the hotel, had two
hundred guests—this
year forty-five guests—the
room was chilly
and had a melancholic echo of yesteryears like a luxury
liners’
last voyage, ready to be chopped into bits and sent to
the voracious
furnaces of China’s famished thirsts for steel. ...And
we, the 45, stalwarts from a bygone epoch—the
last of a shrinking middle class.
Too many waiters, too many cooks—they
knew what was coming next—the
dole. Who needs a flat footed waiter or a cook
you can’t teach new tricks? Twelve o’clock—we
toasted one another but our joy rang hollow in the big
room. The party was supposed
to continue until four in the morning as it had before—
most guests left at
quarter past twelve; the crew, we dastardly deserted,
drank the wine and ate the food left behind—
we had a proper wake.
