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:
- Нина Воронель – Суета
- Владимир Британишский – Аэрогеофизик
- Альфред де Мюссе – Что так усиленно сердце больное
- La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
- A Man Young And Old: V. The Empty Cup by William Butler Yeats
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Современная идиллия
- The Song of the Old Guard by Rudyard Kipling
- To Be Blind
- Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer by Robert Burns
- Николай Языков – А. Н. Татаринову (Здорово, брат! Поставь сюда две чаши)
- Baptistry
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На улице
- Alicante Lullaby by Sylvia Plath
- Sonnet 54: O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem by William Shakespeare
- Song III: It Grew Up Without Heeding by William Morris
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
- I Dream I M The Death Of Orpheus
- From An Atlas Of The Difficult World
- From A Survivor
- Fox
- For This
- For The Record
- For The Dead
- Final Notions
- Diving Into The Wreck
- Diving Wreck
- Cartographies Of Silence
- Burning Oneself Out
- Aunt Jennifer039s Tigers
- Aunt Jennifers Tigers
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- The Ugly Little Bird
- Poems.html 0
- Mountain Wellhead
- In The Bus That Is Frantically Rushing From Cairo To Port Said
- Youth
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
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.