He lurks among the reeds, beside the marsh,
Red oleanders twisted in His hair,
His eyes are haggard and His lips are harsh,
Upon His breast the bones show gaunt and bare.
The green and stagnant waters lick His feet,
And from their filmy, iridescent scum
Clouds of mosquitoes, gauzy in the heat,
Rise with His gifts: Death and Delirium.
His messengers: They bear the deadly taint
On spangled wings aloft and far away,
Making thin music, strident and yet faint,
From golden eve to silver break of day.
The baffled sleeper hears th’ incessant whine
Through his tormented dreams, and finds no rest
The thirsty insects use his blood for wine,
Probe his blue veins and pasture on his breast.
While far away He in the marshes lies,
Staining the stagnant water with His breath,
An endless hunger burning in His eyes,
A famine unassuaged, whose food is Death.
He hides among the ghostly mists that float
Over the water, weird and white and chill,
And peasants, passing in their laden boat,
Shiver and feel a sense of coming ill.
A thousand burn and die; He takes no heed,
Their bones, unburied, strewn upon the plain,
Only increase the frenzy of His greed
To add more victims to th’ already slain.
He loves the haggard frame, the shattered mind,
Gloats with delight upon the glazing eye,
Yet, in one thing, His cruelty is kind,
He sends them lovely dreams before they die;
Dreams that bestow on them their heart’s desire,
Visions that find them mad, and leave them blest,
To sink, forgetful of the fever’s fire,
Softly, as in a lover’s arms, to rest.
A few random poems:
- A Prayer in the Prospect of Death by Robert Burns
- We Two—How Long We were Fool’d. by Walt Whitman
- Faery Songs poem – John Keats poems
- A Tale. June 1793 by William Cowper
- Daddy, daddy, I can’t go to school by Raj Arumugam
- Robert Burns: Stanzas On The Same Occasion [Prospect of Death]:
- The Kiss by Siegfried Sassoon
- Как Снегурочка дела
- America
- Premature Blindness by Winston Riley
- Poor Mailie’s Elegy by Robert Burns
- Ballade Made In The Hot Weather by William Ernest Henley
- Threshold by Rabindranath Tagore
- Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women by Anne Sexton
- Шекспир – Что, если бы я право заслужил – Сонет 125
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
- Limericks by Robby Charters
- It is a Show by Rixa White
- Haiku by Robby Charters
- Forgotten Promises by Rixa White
- For what’s worth breathing by Rixa White
- Everlasting Wander by Rixa White
- Drowned in Illusion by Rixa White
- Dropping Truth on That Pretty Little Head by Rob Leatherman Sr.
- Clinic by Rob Leatherman Sr.
- An Untold Love by Rixa White
- A Wandering Knight by Rixa White
- A Slight Change by Rixa White
- A Perfect World by Robby Charters
- Winged And Acid Dark by Robert Hass
- Under Cover of Night by Robert Desnos
- The Voice of Robert Desnos by Robert Desnos
- The Sympathies of the Long Married by Robert Bly
- The Song of the Borderguard by Robert Duncan
- The Ring of Stars by Robert Desnos
- The Cat in the Kitchen by Robert Bly
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.