To make sure
You have not said:
“I love you,”
They smell your breath.
They even smell your heart
Trying times are these, my darling.
They flog love
Tied to the post of the cul-de-sac
We must hide love in the closet.
In this serpentine maze
This crooked cold corner
They feed the fire
With poems and songs
Thinking, too, is risky.
Those who, late at night, knock on the door,
Are there to kill the lamp.
We must hide the light in the closet.
Then there are the butchers
Stationed at all cross-roads,
Armed with a block and a bloody cleaver.
Trying times these are, my darling.
Surgically,
They plant smiles on lips,
And songs in the mouths.
We must hide joy in the closet.
On lilies and lilacs,
They roast the canaries.
Trying times these are, my darling.
Drunk with victory, the Devil,
Celebrates our wake.
We must hide God in the closet.
A few random poems:
- To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee by William Butler Yeats
- Counter-Attack by Siegfried Sassoon
- Buddha’s Laugh by Sonya Ki Tomlinson
- Sonet 54 by William Alexander
- The Gardener LI: Then Finish the Last Song by Rabindranath Tagore
- Lyonnesse by Sylvia Plath
- Sunset And Sunrise (Translated From Owen) by William Cowper
- The Paper Nautilus by Marianne Moore
- A Love By The Sea by William Ernest Henley
- Less Than The Cloud To The Wind by Sara Teasdale
- A Poetical Epistle To Lady Austen by William Cowper
- Bogland by Seamus Heaney
- The Family Monkey by Russell Edson
- Зинаида Александрова – Дозор
- To His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor by Phillis Wheatley
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
- Phantasm
- Long I waited in vain
- was_then.html
- phantasm.html
- long_i_waited_in_vain.html
- Wind on the Hill by A. A. Milne
- Us Two by AA Milne
- twinkletoes.html
- The Morning Walk
- the_kings_breakfast.html
- the_dormouse_and_the_doctor.html
- the_christening.html
- Teddy Bear
- rice_pudding.html
- politeness.html
- Missing
- market_square.html
- lines_and_squares.html
- if_i_were_king.html
- hoppity.html
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
