If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.
A few random poems:
- haiku
- Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory by Robert Burns
- Apprehensions by Sylvia Plath
- Stars
- Amphion poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- poetry_and_politics.html
- The Ice Palace by William Cowper
- Essay On The Personal by Stephen Dunn
- Raindrops by Michael Mulcahy
- She’s Flawless by Mandy Williams
- Prologue to Rodin in Rime poem – Aleister Crowley poems | Poetry Monster
- Black Rook In Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath
- Jerusalem Delivered – Book 03 – part 05 by Torquato Tasso
- If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain’d poem – John Keats poems
- Song of Myself by Sir Walter Raleigh
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
- Every Sect has a Faith – Har Qaum Raast Raahay poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Every Sect has a Faith – Har Qaum Raast Raahay poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 7 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 6 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 5 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 4 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 3 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 2 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 11 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 10 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Couplet 1 poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- O Wondrous Ecstatic Eyes – Chashmay Mastay poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Chaap Tilak poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Celebrate Spring Today poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Bahut Kathin Hai poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Babul poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- What a Glow Everywhere I see – Aaj Rung Hai poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Celebrate Spring Today poem with a translation – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Words You Said poem – Andrew Neil Maternick poems | Poems and Poetry
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
A. Van Jordan, born 1965 in Akron, Ohio, USA, is a contemporary American poet and the author of four important collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton,, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize.