If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.
A few random poems:
- Василий Жуковский – Человек
- Off the Turnpike poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Омар Хайям – До коих пор униженный позор терпеть
- The Choral Union by Siegfried Sassoon
- Hymn To Death poem – Alfred Austin
- Waiting For The Beloved — English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Lines to a Gentleman who sent a Newspaper by Robert Burns
- Sleep by Russell Edson
- The Rwose In The Dark by William Barnes
- Низами Гянджеви – Из месяца лишь день прошел
- Northern Farmer: New Style poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Her Reply by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Fragments
- The 9th Inning poem – Ygor Noblott poems | Poetry Monster
- An Epitaph 3 (From The Greek) by William Cowper
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
- Ballade Of Roulette poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Queen Anne poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Old Plays poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Worldly Wealth poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of True Wisdom poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Voyage To Cythera poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Tweed poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Summer Term poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Southern Cross poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Royal Game Of Golf poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Muse poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Midnight Forest poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Dream poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Dead Cities poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Bookworm poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Sleep poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Roulette poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Queen Anne poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Old Plays poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of His Books poem – Andrew Lang poems
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
A. Van Jordan, born 1965 in Akron, Ohio, USA, is a contemporary American poet and the author of four important collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton,, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize.