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:
- To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo
- Spring Thing by Paul Blackburn
- The Scissors-Grinder by Vachel Lindsay
- The Song of the Old Guard by Rudyard Kipling
- The Colossus by Sylvia Plath
- New Love, New Life poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Woodlark poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Urban Caterpillar by Minal Sarosh
- Gentle Heart, Indulge Thy Dreaming by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- Freemen by John Oxenham
- XIV: Some Verses: To Mr. Edward Allane by William Alexander
- Ballade Of Cleopatra’s Needle poem – Andrew Lang poems
- A Poetry Reading At West Point by William Matthews
- Peace poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- The River Of Bees by W. S. Merwin
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
- Parliament Hill Fields by Sylvia Plath
- Paralytic by Sylvia Plath
- Owl by Sylvia Plath
- Ouija by Sylvia Plath
- Night Shift by Sylvia Plath
- Natural History by Sylvia Plath
- Mystic by Sylvia Plath
- Owl by Sylvia Plath
- Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath
- Ouija by Sylvia Plath
- Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
- Night Shift by Sylvia Plath
- Moonrise by Sylvia Plath
- Natural History by Sylvia Plath
- Mirror by Sylvia Plath
- Mystic by Sylvia Plath
- Midsummer Mobile by Sylvia Plath
- Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath
- Metaphors by Sylvia Plath
- Morning Song 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