A poem by Alan Dugan
For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said.
The old wound in my ass
has opened up again, but I
am past the prodigies
of youth’s campaigns, and weep
where I used to laugh
in war’s red humors, half
in love with silly-assed pains
and half not feeling them.
I have to sit up with
an indoor unsittable itch
before I go down late
and weeping to the storm-
cellar on a dirty night
and go to bed with the worms.
So pull the dirt up over me
and make a family joke
for Old Billy Blue Balls,
the oldest private in the world
with two ass-holes and no
place more to go to for a laugh
except the last one. Say:
The North won the Civil War
without much help from me
although I wear a proof
of the war’s obscenity.
A few random poems:
- The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball by Thomas Lux
- Николай Глазков – Давно хотел сложить стихи
- Loitering with a Vacant Eye poem – A. E. Housman
- The Heritage by Rudyard Kipling
- The Lament Of The Old Nurse
- Владимир Бенедиктов – К женщине
- Владимир Корнилов – Вечер Гарри Каспарова в Политехническом
- children039s_eyes.html
- Excelsior. by Walt Whitman
- Song—Fragment—Leezie Lindsay by Robert Burns
- market_square.html
- At The San Francisco Airport by Yvor Winters
- Exit by Rita Dove
- The Language of William Dunbar
- Олег Бундур – Чайковский
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Как жаль, что много лет назад
- Как живёшь ветеран милиции
- Какая мама молодец
- Как хочу я в День влюбленных
- Как хорошо, что рядом верная подруга
- Как хорошо иметь подругу
- Как тяжело, когда идет война
- Как в поход я собираюсь
- Как воздух, математика нужна
- Как сегодня тихо в классе
- Как Снегурочка дела
- Как тамада я выступаю в роли теоретика
- Как привить ребенку любовь к чтению: советы и рекомендации – Poetry Monster
- Как просто было в юности
- Как прекрасны все цветы
- Ирина Гурина – Как пчёлы чуть не поссорились
- Ирина Гурина – Как появляются листочки
- Как прекрасно твое имя
- Как не бывает утро без рассвета
- Как небо сходится с водой
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works

Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.