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:
- Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been by William Shakespeare
- Robert Burns: The Posie :
- Leisure by William Henry Davies
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня о Земле
- Jonathan: The First Booke by William Alexander
- Gus: The Theatre Cat by T. S. Eliot
- By Garpal Stream by Stanley Wilkin
- The Flowers poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Геннадий Айги – Два эпилога
- Федор Сваровский – Пилот и Биби Хлотрос
- Аля Кудряшева – Я тут недавно встретила свое прошлое
- A Photograph on the Desk by Mary Etta Metcalf
- By The Fates poem – Alfred Austin
- Black song about a black woman and red wine by Vinko Kalinić
- Николай Заболоцкий – Шакалы
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
- Иван Мятлев – Падучая звезда
- Иван Мятлев – Приди, приди
- Иван Мятлев – Розы
- Иван Мятлев – Сельское хозяйство
- Иван Мятлев – Лютня
- Иван Мятлев – Наставление Гр[афине] Р[астопчиной]
- Иван Мятлев – Фонарики
- Иван Мятлев – Бывало
- Иван Мятлев – День рождения
- Иван Киуру – Роща заалела
- Иван Киуру – Теленок Леня
- Иван Киуру – Звездный полет
- Иван Киуру – Оазис
- Иван Киуру – От северной половины земного шара
- Иван Киуру – Песня моряка
- Иван Киуру – Человек
- Иван Киуру – Ершок с вершок
- Иван Киуру – Кот и жук
- Иван Киуру – Медовый аптекарь
- What’s wrong with volunteering?
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.