A poem discovered recently.

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No Matter Where We Go - Henrik Nordbrandt

No matter where we go

we always arrive too late

to experience what we left to find.

And in whatever cities we stay

it is the houses where it is too late to return

the gardens where it's too late to spend a moonlit night

and the women whom it's too late to love

that disturb us with their intangible presence.

And whatever streets we think we know

take us past the gardens we are searching for

whose heavy fragance spreads throughout the neighborhood.

And whatever houses we return to

we arrive too late at night to be recognized

And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections

we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs.

Translated by Alexander taylor

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Found this poem in "The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry". The reason this poem appeals to me is the quiet sense of existential anguish that it's dowsed in, the realization that life lies tantalizingly close but perenially beyond one's fingertips and that it's always too late.

What is more important, I think, is the realization that -- for some of us at least -- the possibility of something -- dreams, an alternate world, love -- will always appeal more than the reality around us. This conflict, this emotional tug-of-war between yearning for a distant possibility and settling for an immediate secure reality, this confrontation of the abstract with the concrete is a theme of many lives*.

What I like is the way Nordbrandt brings about the insufficiency of this mortal life, how meagre it is compared to the substantial human appetite for experience, how there is never enough time to know anything completely -- even yourself (And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections /
we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs), how one cannot love as much as one wants to (the women whom it's too late to love), how no search will find what it set out to find and how knowledge as we know it is completely useless because it can never ever be complete. I like the way he does not over-dramatize but instead chooses to just simply say, "disturb us with their intangible presence". Intangible indeed.

Oh and the loneliness that runs through this poem like a quiet stream gurgling through a forest -- one cannot but quote Bertrand Russell, "...an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness". It is rather discomforting to come home and realize that nobody recognizes the real you. But then the lives we lead don't afford us the luxury of such truths and before we know it we've plunged headlong into the delusions that sustain us. Because, at the end of the day, one somehow has to find a way to remain content, to continue with life and believe in the possibility of happiness.

Another poem by Henrik Nordbrandt - Sailing.

* - Including my twenties thus far.