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:
- Pride and Fury by Mahmoud Darwish
- Василий Курочкин – Поэту адвокату
- Rain falling by Vladimir Marku
- minding love by Raj Arumugam
- The house where I was born (04) by Yves Bonnefoy
- They Did Not Expect This by Vernon Scannell
- Princess: A Medley: The splendour falls on castle walls poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
- The Gardener XXXIV: Do Not Go, My Love by Rabindranath Tagore
- Николай Языков – Песни (Счастлив, кому судьбою дан)
- Green Fields by W. S. Merwin
- Robert Burns: To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church
- In Praise of Songs that Die by Vachel Lindsay
- An Eccho by William Alexander
- Politics by William Butler Yeats
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
- Et Le Marbre Creuse… by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
- Does Our Spirit Fly Away by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep by Mary Frye
- Disingenuousness by Mark R Slaughter
- Days Are Gone by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Dans les filets de midi by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Courtship by Mark Strand
- Coming To This by Mark Strand
- Coming to Terms by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Collateral Damage by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Collage by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Chronicles by Mark Olynyk
- Ce N’est Jamais Le Même Jardin by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- C’est la nuit aveugle by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Books by Mark Olynyk
- Awaken by Mark Miller
- Avec seulement du noir by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- Attente by Martine Morillon-Carreau
- At This Very Moment by Mary TallMountain
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