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:
- Loot by Rudyard Kipling
- Владимир Британишский – Античник Альтман
- Smoke by Théophile Gautier
- The First Part: Sonnet 10 – Fair Moon, who with thy cold and silver shine by William Drummond
- Madonna poem – Alfred Austin
- Epithalamion poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Tear of warm dew of mind by Seema Gupta
- You Say You Love poem – John Keats poems
- Song—Fragment—Leezie Lindsay by Robert Burns
- Владимир Маяковский – Чтоб с голодом справиться и с разрухой-дурой (Главполитпросвет)
- Aunt Jennifers Tigers
- The Messiah : A Sacred Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Николай Некрасов – Не рыдай так безумно над ним
- The Artist by Sir Walter Raleigh
- A Peck of Gold by Robert Frost
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
- Note to Reality by Tony Hoagland
- National Trust by Tony Harrison
- Memory As a Hearing Aid by Tony Hoagland
- Marked with D. by Tony Harrison
- Lucky by Tony Hoagland
- Long Distance II by Tony Harrison
- Long Distance I by Tony Harrison
- Jet by Tony Hoagland
- Tony Harrison – Tony Harrison
- In Praise of Their Divorce by Tony Hoagland
- I Have News For You by Tony Hoagland
- Heredity by Tony Harrison
- Grammar by Tony Hoagland
- Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland
- Disappointment by Tony Hoagland
- Coming and Going by Tony Hoagland
- Book Ends by Tony Harrison
- Big Grab by Tony Hoagland
- Bible Study by Tony Hoagland
- Beauty by Tony Hoagland
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