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:
- Lucky by Tony Hoagland
- Bringen Woone Gwaïn O’ Zundays by William Barnes
- The Human Seasons poem – John Keats poems
- Владимир Набоков – Кинематораф
- Sonnet I: Loving In Truth by Sir Philip Sidney
- Владимир Данько – Верхом на палочке
- Омар Хайям – Что я дружу с вином, не отрицаю, нет
- Watching the Bird Watcher by Richard Schiffman
- Николай Рубцов – Жеребенок
- Baldovan by William Topaz McGonagall
- Валерий Брюсов – К.Д. Бальмонту (Как прежде, мы вдвоем, в ночном кафе. За входом)
- Some Say by Mark Miller
- Какие яблоки в саду
- Olney Hymn 23: Pleading For And With Youth by William Cowper
- Decalogue poem – by Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
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
- For What As Easy by W H Auden
- Five Songs – II by W H Auden
- Fish in the Unruffled Lakes by W H Auden
- Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
- Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
- Edward Lear by W H Auden
- Doggerel by a Senior Citizen by W H Auden
- Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly by W H Auden
- Two Songs for Hedli Anderson by W. H. Auden
- The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
- The More Loving One by W. H. Auden
- The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden
- September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
- On the Circuit by W. H. Auden
- In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden
- In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden
- If I could tell you by W. H. Auden
- For Friends Only by W. H. Auden
- Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
- Death’s Echo by W H Auden
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