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:
- Walls at Drogheda by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
- Aesop poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Василий Курочкин – Мы всё смешное косим, косим
- Second Poem by Peter Orlovsky
- On the Building of Springfield by Vachel Lindsay
- Sonnet 10
- A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton by Robert Burns
- Fire, Famine, And Slaughter : A War Eclogue by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Михаил Лермонтов – Жена севера
- Song. Murdering Beauty by Thomas Carew
- Юнна Мориц – Благолепие света
- The Three Beggars by William Butler Yeats
- You by Thonda Sri Indrani
- On Passing The New Menin Gate by Siegfried Sassoon
- Dead Men’s Love by Rupert Brooke
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
- A Paralell Between Bowling And Preferment by William Strode
- A New Year’s Gift by William Strode
- A Necklace by William Strode
- A Lover To His Mistress by William Strode
- A Girdle by William Strode
- Yesterday by W. S. Merwin
- Wish by W. S. Merwin
- Whenever I Go There by W. S. Merwin
- When You Go Away by W. S. Merwin
- Vehicles by W. S. Merwin
- Unknown Bird by W. S. Merwin
- The Speed Of Light by W. S. Merwin
- The Source by W. S. Merwin
- The Ships Are Made Ready In Silence by W. S. Merwin
- The River Of Bees by W. S. Merwin
- The Burnt Child by W. S. Merwin
- Term by W. S. Merwin
- Some Last Questions by W. S. Merwin
- One of the Lives by W. S. Merwin
- On the Subject of Poetry by W. S. Merwin
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