On the wooden deck of the wooden Junk, silent, alone, we lie,
With silver foam about the bow, and a silver moon in the sky:
A glimmer of dimmer silver here, from the anklets round your feet,
Our lips may close on each other’s lips, but never our souls may meet.
For though in my arms you lie at rest, your name I have never heard,
To carry a thought between us two, we have not a single word.
And yet what matter we do not speak, when the ardent eyes have spoken,
The way of love is a sweeter way, when the silence is unbroken.
As a wayward Fancy, tired at times, of the cultured Damask Rose,
Drifts away to the tangled copse, where the wild Anemone grows;
So the ordered and licit love ashore, is hardly fresh and free
As this light love in the open wind and salt of the outer sea.
So sweet you are, with your tinted cheeks and your small caressive hands,
What if I carried you home with me, where our Golden Temple stands?
Yet, this were folly indeed; to bind, in fetters of permanence,
A passing dream whose enchantment charms because of its trancience.
Life is ever a slave to Time; we have but an hour to rest,
Her steam is up and her lighters leave, the vessel that takes me west;
And never again we two shall meet, as we chance to meet to-night,
On the Junk, whose painted eyes gaze forth, in desolate want of sight.
And what is love at its best, but this? Conceived by a passing glance,
Nursed and reared in a transient mood, on a drifting Sea of Chance.
For rudderless craft are all our loves, among the rocks and the shoals,
Well we may know one another’s speech, but never each other’s souls.
Give here your lips and kiss me again, we have but a moment more,
Before we set the sail to the mast, before we loosen the oar.
Good-bye to you, and my thanks to you, for the rest you let me share,
While this night drifted away to the Past, to join the Nights that Were.
A few random poems:
- Robert Burns: Epistle To Robert Graham, Esq., Of Fintry: Requesting a Favour
- Олег Григорьев – Слезы
- Василий Кубанёв – 12 июля
- On a Scotch Bard, gone to the West Indies by Robert Burns
- Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei
- Sonnet To George Keats: Written In Sickness poem – John Keats poems
- Наум Коржавин – От дурачеств, от ума ли
- Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen by William Butler Yeats
- Иван Бунин – Пустыня, грусть в степных просторах
- Николай Карамзин – К милости
- Persephone, Falling by Rita Dove
- Why Write? by Mark Olynyk
- Алексей Толстой – Стасюлевич и Маркевич
- Эмиль Верхарн – Зимняя пора
- “`Father, farewell! Be not distressed” poem – Alfred Austin
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
- In Every Language by Rifat Ilgaz
- I’m Sexy and I Know It by Aiyah De Torres
- I Write a Poem by Aiyah De Torres
- Girl Child – An Alternate Reality by Rekha Seshadri
- Elusive Lover by Renu Ayyar
- Crows and Hawks by Richard Schiffman
- Clever Stalk by Richard Schiffman
- Buddies by Richard Schiffman
- Buddha at Kamakura by Rudyard Kipling
- Beyond Darkness And Despair by Renu Ayyar
- Before you go a little way prospecting by T. Wignesan
- Are You a Thinking Man? by Rifat Ilgaz
- A Lost Friend, I Never Had by Renu Ayyar
- A Goddess by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Vacation by Rita Dove
- Tonight she remembers by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- There Came a Soul by Rita Dove
- The Emotion Line by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- The Bistro Styx by Rita Dove
- The Secret Garden by Rita Dove
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
Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.