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 Death
- Writing Science Poetry
- Владимир Высоцкий – У меня было сорок фамилий
- These nights by Manushya Puthiran
- Freddy by Stevie Smith
- Владимир Британишский – Кваренги
- Олег Бундур – Для чего бывает день
- In May by William Henry Davies
- A Hymn to Love by Robert Herrick
- The Dawn
- Вера Павлова – Вот и пришли времена
- They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine
- Sword Blades and Poppy Seed poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit by Vachel Lindsay
- White Horses by Rudyard Kipling
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 house where I was born (10) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (09) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (08) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (07) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (06) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (05) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (04) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (03) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (02) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The house where I was born (01) by Yves Bonnefoy
- The Hawthorn Tree by Willa Cather
- Street In Packingtown by Willa Sibert Cather
- Spanish Johnny by Willa Sibert Cather
- Poppies on Ludlow Castle by Willa Cather
- Paradox by Willa Cather
- London Roses by Willa Cather
- Passer-By, These Are Words by Yves Bonnefoy
- Arcadian Winter by Willa Cather
- Once A Great Love by Yehuda Amichai
- On Rabbi Kook’s Street by Yehuda Amichai
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