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 Common Life by W H Auden
- Doors Of The Temple poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Что такое хорошо и что такое плохо – Владимир Маяковский (Стих): Читать стихотворение на Poetry Monster
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Стучись, упорствуя, Кирка
- Джон Мильтон – По случаю своего двадцатитрехлетия
- The Princess (part 1) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Юлия Друнина – Хорошо молодое лицо
- September by Ted Hughes
- Анатолий Жигулин – Эпоха
- And the days are not full enough poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Ольга Ермолаева – Ты где летал, мой падающий с Фанских гор
- Green Thumb by Philip Levine
- Great are the Myths. by Walt Whitman
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- run home, run home butterfly by Raj Arumugam
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
- CBSE Education: Teaching Creative Learning
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- How Do You Know when Someone is in Love with You?
- Meditation For Writing – Three Tips to Improve your Writing with Creative Meditation
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- Be Healthier, Live Longer By Being Creative!
- How To Publish Your Writing With Duotrope
- How to Survive After Losing a Loved One
- Interior Design Institutes in Dehradun
- Unrequited Love – Why Can’t You Love Me Back?
- Transsexual Children Confused by Body Image
- Youths Can Raise Funds, Fight Drug Abuse Through Education
- Passion For Light
- Love and Burgers: Compatible or Incompatible Relationship?
- Sex – Hinduism Shows the Scientific Way!
- Book Review – The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
- Poetic Vision – Heaven’s Door
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- Yoga and Love – Part I
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