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:
- Lines written on a Bank-note by Robert Burns
- Gwin King of Norway by William Blake
- The Rape of the Lock poem – Alexander Pope
- Lines on Curll poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath
- Sonnet 74: But be contented when that fell arrest by William Shakespeare
- Николай Языков – Пловец (Воют волны, скачут волны)
- An ode to you by Tanisha Avarsekar
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- Николай Заболоцкий – Голубиная книга
- Not my poem
- Sonnet 64: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced by William Shakespeare
- The Fairest, Brightest, Hues Of Ether Fade by William Wordsworth
- Respect her by Vinaya Kumar Hanumanthappa
- Владимир Степанов – Гусь и цыплёнок
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
- Strumpet Song by Sylvia Plath
- Street Song by Sylvia Plath
- Stopped Dead by Sylvia Plath
- Stings by Sylvia Plath
- Stillborn by Sylvia Plath
- Spinster by Sylvia Plath
- Spider by Sylvia Plath
- Sow by Sylvia Plath
- Southern Sunrise by Sylvia Plath
- Snakecharmer by Sylvia Plath
- Sculptor by Sylvia Plath
- Rhyme by Sylvia Plath
- Resolve by Sylvia Plath
- Recantation by Sylvia Plath
- Pursuit by Sylvia Plath
- Purdah by Sylvia Plath
- Prospect by Sylvia Plath
- Private Ground by Sylvia Plath
- Point Shirley by Sylvia Plath
- Poems, Potatoes by Sylvia Plath
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