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:
- Eclogue:–The Common A-Took In by William Barnes
- Orlando Furioso Canto 19 by Ludovico Ariosto
- April Aubade by Sylvia Plath
- Robert Burns: Epitaph For Mr. William Michie: Schoolmaster of Cleish Parish, Fifeshire.
- At Night poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Native Moments. by Walt Whitman
- Ольга Ермолаева – Напиши мне стишок
- Coconut by Paul Hostovsky
- Not Fair
- Cinema Calendar Of The Abstract Heart; 09 by Tristan Tzara
- Michael Robartes And The Dancer by William Butler Yeats
- Sorrow’s Importunity poem – Alfred Austin
- I’ll go and be a Sodger by Robert Burns
- Владимир Маяковский – Что значило “празднование новогоднее”?.. (РОСТА №672)
- first_verse.html
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
- La Nue
- Kyrenaikos
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- I Loved
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Fragments
- Eudaemon
- El Extraviado
- Do You Remember Once
- Coucy
- Champagne 1914 15
- Broceliande
- Bellinglise
- At The Tomb Of Napoleon
- Ariosto Orlando Furioso Canto X 91 99
- Antinous
- An Ode To Antares
- All Thats Not Love
- After An Epigram Of Clement Marot
- A Message To America
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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.