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:
- Of Him I Love Day and Night. by Walt Whitman
- The Mountain Tomb by William Butler Yeats
- Robert Burns: Duncan Davison :
- Николай Некрасов – Я не люблю иронии твоей
- Come After Jinny by Shel Silverstein
- Владимир Маяковский – Не только для того, чтоб тебя накормить… (Главполитпросвет №2)
- Robert Burns: My Eppie Adair:
- Олег Сердобольский – Мошка Машка
- I Sing The Body Electric by Philip Levine
- Wednesday by Marvin Bell
- Danny O’Dare by Shel Silverstein
- Николай Гумилев – Кенгуру
- Константин Батюшков – Мщение
- Letter To A Purist by Sylvia Plath
- Hare-hunting by William Somervile
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
- Sonnet 08 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 07 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 06 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 05 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 04 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 03: Canzone poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 03 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 02 poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 01 poem – John Milton poems
- Song On May Morning poem – John Milton poems
- Samson Agonistes poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 88 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 87 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 86 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 85 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 84 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 83 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 82 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 81 poem – John Milton poems
- Psalm 80 poem – John Milton 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