Meeting
by A. S. J. Tessimond
Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell,
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.
We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair; before the inept lips open.
Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely; skin unhappy …
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennae stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

A few random poems:
- Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old by William Shakespeare
- Poem Stories
- Charity thou art a lie, by Stephen Crane
- The light from an earthen lamp by Sunil Sharma
- Валерий Брюсов – И он взглянул, и ты уснула, и он ушел, и умер день
- Вера Павлова – Завещание
- At The Cenotaph by Siegfried Sassoon
- Владимир Луговской – Пепел
- The Gardener XXIV: Do Not Keep to Yourself by Rabindranath Tagore
- Psalm Three by Mahmoud Darwish
- Clouds by Philip Levine
- The Bride-Cake by Robert Herrick
- William Stafford – William Stafford
- dear moon, you will understand by Raj Arumugam
- Rubber Souls poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
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 Praise Of England poem – Alfred Austin
- Impromptu: To Frances Garnet Wolseley poem – Alfred Austin
- If I To You But Sorry Bring poem – Alfred Austin
- I Chide Not At The Seasons poem – Alfred Austin
- Hymn To Death poem – Alfred Austin
- Grandmother’s Teaching poem – Alfred Austin
- Gleaners Of Fame poem – Alfred Austin
- Farewell To Spring poem – Alfred Austin
- The Golden Age poem – Alfred Austin
- “The flower, full blown, now bends the stalk, now breaks” poem – Alfred Austin
- The Fallen Elm poem – Alfred Austin
- The Evening Light poem – Alfred Austin
- The Dregs Of Love poem – Alfred Austin
- The Door Of Humility poem – Alfred Austin
- The Death Of Huss poem – Alfred Austin
- The Dance At Darmstadt poem – Alfred Austin
- The Challenge Answered poem – Alfred Austin
- The Aquittal Of Phryne poem – Alfred Austin
- “Take not the Gods to task, for they are wise” poem – Alfred Austin
- Sweet Love Is Dead poem – Alfred Austin
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