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:
- From The ‘Antigone’ by William Butler Yeats
- Sonnet I
- Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
- Яков Полонский – Чайка
- Robert Burns: To The Beautiful Miss Eliza J-N: On her Principles of Liberty and Equality.
- an evening’s music by Raj Arumugam
- Валерий Брюсов – К народу
- Asking For Roses by Robert Frost
- Владимир Маяковский – Сердитый дядя
- In A Wood by Thomas Hardy
- Михаил Кузмин – В легкой лени
- On Returning To England poem – Alfred Austin
- Book Sixth [Cambridge and the Alps] by William Wordsworth
- Омар Хайям – Есть много вер, и все несхожи
- Émigrés by Anna Barkova
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
- Robinson by Weldon Kees
- The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees
- Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees
- La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
- Interregnum by Weldon Kees
- Dead March by Weldon Kees
- Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees
- Colloquy by Weldon Kees
- A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees
- A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees
- 1926 by Weldon Kees
- Woods by Wendell Berry
- What We Need Is Here by Wendell Berry
- Water by Wendell Berry
- The Wish to be Generous by Wendell Berry
- The Silence by Wendell Berry
- The Real Work by Wendell Berry
- The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry
- The Man Born to Farming by Wendell Berry
- The Lilies by Wendell Berry
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