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:
- Welcome To My World © by Shannen Wrass
- Widow by Sylvia Plath
- Glitches by Satish Verma
- Not Love Perhaps
- A Light In The Attic by Shel Silverstein
- Please Don’t Judas Me by Mark Miller
- Sleep by Sir Philip Sidney
- Sonnet 16: But wherefore do not you a mightier way by William Shakespeare
- Song—She’s Fair and Fause by Robert Burns
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На берегу
- Sonnet 85: My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still by William Shakespeare
- La Figlia che Piange by T. S. Eliot
- An Enigma by William Cowper
- The Freedom Of Poetry by Ndue Ukaj
- Иван Крылов – Ода, выбранная из псалма 71-го
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
- Dark Wood, Dark Water by Sylvia Plath
- Dark House by Sylvia Plath
- Danse Macabre by Sylvia Plath
- Cut by Sylvia Plath
- Crystal Gazer by Sylvia Plath
- Contusion by Sylvia Plath
- Cinderella by Sylvia Plath
- Childless Woman by Sylvia Plath
- Child by Sylvia Plath
- Channel Crossing by Sylvia Plath
- Candles by Sylvia Plath
- Bucolics by Sylvia Plath
- Brasilia by Sylvia Plath
- Blue Moles by Sylvia Plath
- Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
- Barren Woman by Sylvia Plath
- Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath
- April Aubade by Sylvia Plath
- April 18 by Sylvia Plath
- Among The Narcissi 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