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:
- Miss Loo by Walter de la Mare
- He is more than a hero by Sappho
- the_emigrant.html
- Compensation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Олег Григорьев – Благо
- Владимир Британишский – От низменного к неземному
- Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar
- Михаил Кузмин – Три раза я его видел лицом к лицу
- Best Friend by Nicole M Nugent
- Poem Reaching For Something by Quincy Troupe
- Федор Сваровский – Путешественники во времени. свидетель зиндийского удара
- Владимир Высоцкий – Запись в книге почётных гостей Киевского завода шампанских вин
- On Wenlock Edge The Wood’s In Trouble poem – A. E. Housman
- Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
- A Song To Eleonora Duse In “Francesca da Rimini ” by Sara Teasdale
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
- The Deserted Garden
- The Bayadere
- The Aisne
- Tezcotzinco
- Sonnet Xvi Who Shall Invoke Her
- Sonnet Xv
- Sonnet Xiv
- Sonnet Xiii
- Sonnet Xii
- Sonnet Xi
- Sonnet X
- Sonnet Viii
- Sonnet Vii
- Sonnet Vi
- Sonnet V
- Sonnet Ix
- Sonnet Iv
- Sonnet Iii
- Sonnet Ii
- Sonnet I
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