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:
- Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop by William Butler Yeats
- Polly’s Tree by Sylvia Plath
- in praise of the moon by Raj Arumugam
- Николай Языков – Элегия (Мне ль позабыть огонь и живость)
- Николай Языков – Вот яблоки так яблоки, на славу
- Seed Time And Harvest
- let us go with no care by Raj Arumugam
- Circulation by Raymond Carver
- Николай Некрасов – Влас
- Ольга Седакова – Луг, юго-западный ветер
- Enoch Arden poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Альфред Теннисон – Леди Клара Вер-де-Вер
- Song—A Health to ane I loe dear by Robert Burns
- Unspoken by Satish Verma
- Михаил Лермонтов – Вид гор из степей Козлова
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 Sun Was Slumbering in the West by Thomas Hood
- The Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood
- The Haunted House by Thomas Hood
- The Dream of Eugene Aram by Thomas Hood
- The Death Bed by Thomas Hood
- The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood
- Silence by Thomas Hood
- Ruth by Thomas Hood
- Past and Present by Thomas Hood
- On Mistress Nicely, a Pattern for Housekeepers by Thomas Hood
- November by Thomas Hood
- No! by Thomas Hood
- I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood
- Gold! by Thomas Hood
- Flowers by Thomas Hood
- Faithless Sally Brown by Thomas Hood
- Faithless Nelly Gray by Thomas Hood
- Death by Thomas Hood
- Christmas Holidays by Thomas Hood
- Autumn by Thomas Hood
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