A poem by Alan Dugan
For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said.
The old wound in my ass
has opened up again, but I
am past the prodigies
of youth’s campaigns, and weep
where I used to laugh
in war’s red humors, half
in love with silly-assed pains
and half not feeling them.
I have to sit up with
an indoor unsittable itch
before I go down late
and weeping to the storm-
cellar on a dirty night
and go to bed with the worms.
So pull the dirt up over me
and make a family joke
for Old Billy Blue Balls,
the oldest private in the world
with two ass-holes and no
place more to go to for a laugh
except the last one. Say:
The North won the Civil War
without much help from me
although I wear a proof
of the war’s obscenity.

A few random poems:
- Ольга Седакова – Деревья, сильный ветер
- Robert Burns: Gude Ale Keeps The Heart Aboon:
- polyphony_in_a_cathedral.html
- English Poetry. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. The Blasphemy of Guns. Элла Уилкокс.
- Ярослав Смеляков – В защиту домино
- The Wanderer by W H Auden
- Аля Кудряшева – Про ангелов
- The Scythians poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Ancestors by Siegfried Sassoon
- Нина Веселова – Жена
- Вера Павлова – Время бежит на время
- Philip Levine – Philip Levine
- O Sun of Real Peace. by Walt Whitman
- The First Part: Sonnet 1 – In my first years, and prime yet not at height by William Drummond
- The Mothering Blackness by Maya Angelou
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 Palace
- Storm
- Poor Fisherman
- Invitation
- A Banquet Song
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Vivien
- Virginibus Puerisque
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
- The Hosts
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Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.