A poem by Alan Dugan
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?
The wading, wintered pack-beasts of the feet
slough off, in spring, the dead rind of the shoes’
leather detention, the big toe’s yellow horn
shines with a natural polish, and the whole
person seems to profit. The opposite appears
when dead sharks wash up along the beach
for no known reason. What is more built
for winning than the swept-back teeth,
water-finished fins, and pure bad eyes
these old, efficient forms of appetite
are dressed in? Yet it looks as if the sea
digested what it wished of them with viral ease
and threw up what was left to stink and dry.
If this shows how the sea approaches life
in its propensity to feed as animal entire,
then sharks are comforts, feet are terrified,
but they vacation in the mystery and why not?
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?:
what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back.

A few random poems:
- Василий Жуковский – Торжество победителей
- We Two Boys Together Clinging. by Walt Whitman
- At Vaucluse poem – Alfred Austin
- Нина Воронель – Юбилей в доме литераторов
- “Goldie Pinklesweet…” by Roald Dahl
- Шекспир – Мне показалось, что была зима – Сонет 97
- Robert Burns: Willie Chalmers: Mr. Chalmers, a gentleman in Ayrshire, a particular friend of mine, asked me to write a poetic epistle to a young lady, his Dulcinea. I had seen her, but was scarcely acquainted with her, and wrote as follows:-
- A Character by William Wordsworth
- The Boy by William Henry Davies
- Алексей Толстой – Ты знаешь, я люблю
- Slag by Mark Base
- Федор Сологуб – В мантии серой
- Total Recount by Pamela Griffiths
- Новелла Матвеева – Восток, прошедший чрез воображенье
- Irony poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
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
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- Kyrenaikos
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- Vivien
- I Loved
- Virginibus Puerisque
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- Fragments
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Eudaemon
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
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
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.