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:
- The Everlasting Voices by William Butler Yeats
- Memorial Day For The War Dead by Yehuda Amichai
- Вера Павлова – Поколенье, лишённое почерка и походки
- Владимир Маяковский – Реклама, 1928
- A Song In Storm by Rudyard Kipling
- A Wicker Basket by Robert Creeley
- Purgatory by Maxine Kumin
- The Sea Took Pity poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Passion For Light
- Address to Edinburgh by Robert Burns
- The Stranger poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Игорь Северянин – Парижские Жоржики
- Николай Языков – Элегия (Ночь безлунная звездами)
- The Storm
- To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo
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
- Et Le Marbre Creuse… by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
- Does Our Spirit Fly Away by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep by Mary Frye
- Disingenuousness by Mark R Slaughter
- Days Are Gone by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Dans les filets de midi by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Courtship by Mark Strand
- Coming To This by Mark Strand
- Coming to Terms by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Collateral Damage by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Collage by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Chronicles by Mark Olynyk
- Ce N’est Jamais Le Même Jardin by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- C’est la nuit aveugle by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Books by Mark Olynyk
- Awaken by Mark Miller
- Avec seulement du noir by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Attente by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- At This Very Moment by Mary TallMountain
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.