by Ai
We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don’t want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?
A few random poems:
- To The King’s Most Excellent Majesty by Phillis Wheatley
- Василий Жуковский – К Дмитриеву (Нет, не прошла)
- politeness.html
- Presences by William Butler Yeats
- Robert Burns: The Lament: Occasioned by the unfortunate issue of a Friend’s Amour.
- Vaishnavi Prakash by Vaishnavi Prakash
- Race by Vasko Popa
- “Yes! Thou Art Fair, Yet Be Not Moved” by William Wordsworth
- Sonnet. Written On A Blank Page In Shakespeare’s Poems, Facing ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ poem – John Keats poems
- For What As Easy by W H Auden
- A Prayer For My Son by William Butler Yeats
- Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women by Anne Sexton
- Dublinesque by Philip Larkin
- A bat flits by Yosa Buson
- 1914 IV: The Dead by Rupert Brooke
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
- Youth And Age by William Butler Yeats
- Young Man’s Song by William Butler Yeats
- Words by William Butler Yeats
- Wisdom by William Butler Yeats
- Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad? by William Butler Yeats
- Who Goes With Fergus? by William Butler Yeats
- When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats
- When Helen Lived by William Butler Yeats
- What Was Lost by William Butler Yeats
- What Then? by William Butler Yeats
- Veronica’s Napkin by William Butler Yeats
- Vacillation by William Butler Yeats
- Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation by William Butler Yeats
- Upon A Dying Lady by William Butler Yeats
- Under The Round Tower by William Butler Yeats
- Under Saturn by William Butler Yeats
- Two Years Later by William Butler Yeats
- Two Songs Of A Fool by William Butler Yeats
- Two Songs From A Play by William Butler Yeats
- Towards Break Of Day by William Butler Yeats
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
