by Alan Noakes
Yes the ‘if onlys’ seem to persist for ever
As hovering wraithlike used-up dreams.
‘if only ‘ this or that
On such and such a day
Had varied by an hour or an inch
Or something neglected had been done
Or that something done had been neglected
Then ‘perhaps’ the other might have been:
But then
‘perhaps’ and ‘if only’ are first cousins
Addicted to survival only in our minds.
Copyright ©:
Alan Noakes

A few random poems:
- Иван Барков – Улика подьячего
- Николай Языков – Прощальная песня (В последний раз приволье жизни братской)
- Hobbinol; or The Rural Games – Canto 2 by William Somervile
- Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV, To Richard Boyle, poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- France by Siegfried Sassoon
- From My Last Years. by Walt Whitman
- The Quesion by Rudyard Kipling
- Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City. by Walt Whitman
- An Antheme by William Strode
- Memories of West Street and Lepke by Robert Lowell
- Алексей Жемчужников – Причина разногласия
- Attitude To A Miss by Vladimir Mayakovsky
- The Winds Out of the West Land Blow poem – A. E. Housman
- I Love My Rat
- from The Cave of Making by W H Auden
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