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:
- Владимир Британишский – О, растенья-пустынники дюнных песков
- A Sign-Seeker by Thomas Hardy
- Олег Григорьев – Секрет
- Adieu poem – Yuvraj Johri poems | Poetry Monster
- Alone by Yvor Winters
- If You Only Knew by Robert Desnos
- Стефан Малларме – Вздох
- O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art by William Wordsworth
- I Am Part Of The Load by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- In Honour of the City of London by William Dunbar
- Ольга Берггольц – Стихи о ленинградских большевика
- Николай Рубцов – Зимняя песня
- Epistle To Mrs Teresa Blount.[On Her Leaving The Town After The Coronation] poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Lover’s Song by William Butler Yeats
- On Being Asked For A War Poem by William Butler Yeats
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
- The Fault of It poem – Ezra Pound poems
- The Encounter poem – Ezra Pound poems
- The Bath-Tub poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Tame Cat poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Taking Leave of a Friend poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Sub Mare poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Statement of Being poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Song of the Bowmen of Shu poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Song in the Manner of Housman poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Song poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Silet poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Sestina: Altaforte poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Salutation poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Quies poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Portrait d’Une Femme poem – Ezra Pound poems
- In Tempore Senectutis poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Invern poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Ione, Dead the Long Year poem – Ezra Pound poems
- The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Envoi poem – Ezra Pound 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