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:
- missing.html
- Inscription For A Stone Erected At The Sowing Of A Grove Of Oaks At Chillington, Anno 1791 by William Cowper
- Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries poem – A. E. Housman
- Robert Burns: The Posie :
- Online Lover by Rainbow Reed
- The Balloon Of The Mind by William Butler Yeats
- Epitaph on William Hood, Senior by Robert Burns
- Николай Заболоцкий – Обводной канал
- Sunt Leones by Stevie Smith
- On A Miser, 2 (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- THE WARS by Satish Verma
- Ode to the Bat , a Sonnet
- Chungnan by Wang Wei
- Song—Farewell to the Banks of Ayr by Robert Burns
- Robert Burns: Adam Armour’s Prayer:
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
- One Year by Sharon Olds
- Crab by Sharon Olds
- A Week Later by Sharon Olds
- 1954 by Sharon Olds
- Winter by Shaunna Harper
- Twilight by Shaunna Harper
- The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
- Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper
- River by Shaunna Harper
- Prelude by Shaunna Harper
- Passing by Shaunna Harper
- My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper
- Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper
- La Fleur by Shaunna Harper
- Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper
- In Measures by Shaunna Harper
- Hidebound by Shaunna Harper
- For Someone, Somewhere, In Relation by Shaunna Harper
- Ellipsis by Shaunna Harper
- Chanson D’Amour by Shaunna Harper
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.