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:
- To the Lord Generall Cromwell May 1652 poem – John Milton poems
- Владимир Набоков – Барс
- A Song : The Sparkling Eye by William Cowper
- Years by Sylvia Plath
- Николай Некрасов – Деревенские новости
- Владимир Маяковский – Учитесь! (РОСТА №937)
- Валерий Брюсов – Искатель
- To The Honble Commodore Hood on His Pardoning a Deserter by Phillis Wheatley
- Lines Written In Early Spring by William Wordsworth
- Epitaph for William Nicol, High School, Edinburgh by Robert Burns
- My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn
- Sonnet Ii
- Алексей Толстой – Уж ты нива моя, нивушка
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Скажите
- Dawn
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
- Lovesong by Ted Hughes
- Lineage by Ted Hughes
- How To Paint A Water Lily by Ted Hughes
- Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes
- God’s Grandeur by Ted Hughes
- Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
- Examination at the Womb-Door by Ted Hughes
- Earth-Moon by Ted Hughes
- Crow’s Nerve Fails by Ted Hughes
- Crow’s Fall by Ted Hughes
- Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes
- A Woman Unconscious by Ted Hughes
- Weak by Tanisha Avarsekar
- The battle of fire by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Taketh away by Tanisha Avarsekar
- So tired by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Silent consolation by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Life a chess game by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Life a battlefield by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Late realizations by Tanisha Avarsekar
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.