Olav H. Hauge

After stumbling a long time over impossible trails you are up on top. Hardship didn't crush you, you trod it down, climbed higher. That's how you see it. After life has tossed you away, and you ended up on top like a one-legged wooden horse on a dump. Life is merciful, it blinds and provides illusions, and destiny takes on our burden: foolishness and arrogance become mountains and marshy places, hate and resentment become wounds from enemy arrows, and the doubt always with us becomes cold dry rocky valleys. You go in the door. The pot lies upside down in the hearth, it sprawls with hostile black feet.

If you can make a poem a farmer finds useful, you should be happy. A blacksmith you can never figure out. The worst to please is a carpenter.

An old woodcut of the London Bridge and a colored lithograph of a barley field. There are no other pictures on Ward D. The London Bridge lifts sooty towers above the river. But it's the barley field I see. A golden ocean of barley. It's not like the other grain-fields. Maybe it's those inward-looking eyes gone into it so it becomes heaven? A fall-colored sky, mild, with no harvesters and no scythes.