We have left Gul Kach behind us,
Are marching on Apozai,–
Where pleasure and rest are waiting
To welcome us by and by.
We’re falling back from the Gomal,
Across the Gir-dao plain,
The camping ground is deserted,
We’ll never come back again.
Along the rocks and the defiles,
The mules and the camels wind.
Good-bye to Rahimut-Ullah,
The man who is left behind.
For some we lost in the skirmish,
And some were killed in the fight,
But he was captured by fever,
In the sentry pit, at night.
A rifle shot had been swifter,
Less trouble a sabre thrust,
But his Fate decided fever,
And each man dies as he must.
Behind us, red in the distance.
The wavering flames rise high,
The flames of our burning grass-huts,
Against the black of the sky.
We hear the sound of the river,
An ever-lessening moan,
The hearts of us all turn backwards
To where he is left alone.
We sing up a little louder,
We know that we feel bereft,
We’re leaving the camp together,
And only one of us left.
The only one, out of many,
And each must come to his end,
I wish I could stop this singing,
He happened to be my friend.
We’re falling back from the Gomal
We’re marching on Apozai,
And pleasure and rest are waiting
To welcome us by and by.
Perhaps the feast will taste bitter,
The lips of the girls less kind,–
Because of Rahimut-Ullah,
The man who is left behind!
A few random poems:
- Hymn To Aphrodite by Sappho
- A Recantation by Rudyard Kipling
- Bound for your distant home poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Robert Burns: Epistle To James Smith:
- Olney Hymn 24: Prayer For Children by William Cowper
- The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home by Robert Herrick
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Люблю тебя
- Карл Сэндберг – Анекдот о цикуте для двух афинян
- Олег Бундур – Про затрещины
- Вера Павлова – Отпала от пола
- Beyond Darkness And Despair by Renu Ayyar
- The Eye-Mote by Sylvia Plath
- Олег Бундур – Не боюсь
- A Dream Pang by Robert Frost
- Anecdote Of Canna by Wallace Stevens
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
- Funeral Day Thoughts by Sudheesh Vs
- Flying Home by Sudeep Sen
- Do You Remember 1914 Grandad? by Steve Sant
- Crossroads by Suchi Gaur
- Closure by Suchi Gaur
- Borrowed Verses by Subhash Misra
- A Different September by Steve Sant
- Zen-moment by Sunil Sharma
- Young mother by Sunil Sharma
- Winter dusk at the railway halt by Sunil Sharma
- Valley-dawn by Sunil Sharma
- The workers by Sunil Sharma
- The light from an earthen lamp by Sunil Sharma
- The humble earthen lamp by Sunil Sharma
- The gypsy song by Sunil Sharma
- The Chant of the Indignant of the World by Sunil Sharma
- Surreal landscapes by Sunil Sharma
- To a son abroad by Sunil Sharma
- Relations by Sunil Sharma
- Pharaohs, Protests and Public by Sunil Sharma
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

Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.