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:
- Purdah by Sylvia Plath
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песенка ни про что, или Что случилось в Африке
- Hurting Dive by Satish Verma
- Ольга Седакова – Актеон
- Владимир Британишский – Урочище
- Courtship by Mark Strand
- Омар Хайям – Будь все добро мое кирпич один, в кружало
- Reveille poem – A. E. Housman
- The Coastwise Lights by Rudyard Kipling
- The Boy by William Henry Davies
- The house where I was born (06) by Yves Bonnefoy
- To Songs At the Marriage Of The Lord Fauconberg And The Lady Mary Cromwell poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- On The Wedding Of The Aeronaut poem – Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
- Weak by Tanisha Avarsekar
- How Much Earth by Philip Levine
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
- A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, And Created Pleasure poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Song poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- The Parabolic Ballad poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Self-Portrait poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- The AntiWorlds poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Russian-American Romance poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Rubber Souls poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Modern Nature poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- My Friend’s Light poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Her Story poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Fate poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Abuses and Awards poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- A Ballad (Thesis for a Doctor’s Degree) poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Arrow through the bellybutton poem
- In shadows of night
- The Snake
- 永遠
- Forever
- 歐盟
- Storm poem – André Rostant poems
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.