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:
- The Scholars by William Butler Yeats
- Ольга Берггольц – О да, простые, бедные слова
- On Colley Cibber poem – Alexander Pope
- Loot by Rudyard Kipling
- Chocolate by Rita Dove
- The Chant of the Indignant of the World by Sunil Sharma
- Flowers of Sion: Sonnet 3 – Look how the flower by William Drummond
- The Golden Year! poem – Alfred Austin
- Twenty-Four Hokku On A Modern Theme poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Philomela by Sir Philip Sidney
- Nature’s Law: A Poem by Robert Burns
- Reconciliation by Siegfried Sassoon
- O Living Always—Always Dying. by Walt Whitman
- Новелла Матвеева – Набрела на правильную строчку
- Twice Shy by Seamus Heaney
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
- Summer poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Suggested by the Cover of a Volume of Keats’s poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Stupidity poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Stravinsky’s Three Pieces poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Storm-Racked poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Spring Day poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Song poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sea Shell poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sea Shell poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sancta Maria, Succurre Miseris poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sancta Maria, Succurre Miseris poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Red Slippers poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Reaping poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Petals poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Patterns poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Patience poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Patience poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- On Carpaccio’s Picture: The Dream of St. Ursula 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