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:
- Manhattan Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering. by Walt Whitman
- The Wind In The Hemlock by Sara Teasdale
- Epistle to Major Logan by Robert Burns
- acts_of_love.html
- All Things Can Tempt Me by William Butler Yeats
- PRESCIENCE by Satish Verma
- The White Peacock by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Ballade Of Youth And Age by William Ernest Henley
- Inscription For A Stone Erected At The Sowing Of A Grove Of Oaks At Chillington, Anno 1791 by William Cowper
- The Invention of Honey by Ricardo Sternberg
- Mirage
- Bicycle Ride by Pat Mullan
- Computer Cookies: Are They Good or Bad?
- Эмиль Верхарн – Женщина в черном
- Fortune poem – Zora Bernice May Cross poems
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 Exeter Road poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The End poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Cyclists poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Cross-Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Crescent Moon poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Captured Goddess poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Bungler poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Boston Athenaeum poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Bombardment poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Blue Scarf poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Basket poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Teatro Bambino. Dublin, N. H. poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sword Blades and Poppy Seed poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
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