Nursery Rhyme For A Twenty-First Birthday
by A. S. J. Tessimond
You cannot see the walls that divide your hand
From his or hers or mine when you think you touch it.
You cannot see the walls because they are glass,
And glass is nothing until you try to pass it.
Beat on it if you like, but not too hard,
For glass will break you even while you break it.
Shout, and the sound will be broken and driven backwards,
For glass, though clear as water, is deaf as granite.
This fraudulent inhibition is cunning: wise men
Content themselves with breathing patterns on it.

A few random poems:
- They Thought Her Crazy by Mary Etta Metcalf
- English Poetry. Katharine Tynan. A Woman Commends Her Little Son. Кэтрин Тайнен.
- Counting by Philip Larkin
- Владимир Маяковский – Теоретики
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Чудом тени
- Robert Burns: On The Birth Of A Posthumous Child: Born in peculiar circumstances of family distress.
- Виктор Гончаров – Скоро, скоро я домой поеду
- Far Within Us #5 by Vasko Popa
- The Resting Place
- The Voice of Woman by Shahida Latif
- Barren Woman by Sylvia Plath
- In Praise Of England poem – Alfred Austin
- Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries by A. E. Housman
- Robert Burns: On An Innkeeper Nicknamed “The Marquis”:
- Ah, woe is me, my Mother dear by Robert Burns
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-infernal-regions.html
- honeycomb.html
- Dark Matter by Aaron Baker
- polyphony_in_a_cathedral.html
- one_almost_might.html
- nursery_rhyme_for_a_twenty_first_birthday.html
- Not Love Perhaps
- night_piece.html
- never.html
- music.html
- meeting.html
- last_word_to_childhood.html
- june_sick_room.html
- houses.html
- flight_of_stairs.html
- epitaph_on_a_disturber_of_his_times.html
- Epitaph for Our Children
- empty_room.html
- earthfast.html
- don_juan.html
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