by Agha Shahid Ali
First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn’t wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn’t speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn’t I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn’t know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn’t have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you’ll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end.
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages
Copyright ©:
1987, SUN-Gemini Press
A few random poems:
- Heart of God by Vachel Lindsay
- Robert Burns: Reply To An Announcement By J. Rankine: On His Writing To The Poet, That A Girl In That Part Of The Country Was With A Child To Him.
- The Winds Out of the West Land Blow poem – A. E. Housman
- Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns’s Country poem – John Keats poems
- Владимир Британишский – Первая послевоенная осень
- The Tale of the Tiger-Tree by Vachel Lindsay
- Lover’s Gifts XXII: I Shall Gladly Suffer by Rabindranath Tagore
- An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion by Yehuda Amichai
- Вера Павлова – Твоя хладность
- Deaf Mute in the Pear Tree by P. K. Page
- Conversation 23: On Cause by Rosmarie Waldrop
- An Evening Song. by Sidney Lanier
- Омар Хайям – Чье сердце не горит любовью страстной к милой
- Friendship poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Projector by Shreekumar Varma
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
- Golden Eyes
- From Behind The Lattice
- Feroza
- Feroke
- Fate Knows No Tears
- Farewell
- Fancy
- Famine Song
- Early Love
- Disappointment
- Deserted Gipsys Song Hillside Camp
- Dedication
- Dedication To Malcolm Nicolson
- Camp Followers Song Gomal River
- Back To The Border
- Au Salon
- Atavism
- Ashore
- Among The Sandhills
- Among The Rice Fields
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
