by Ai
We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don’t want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

A few random poems:
- Шекспир – Меня не радует твоя печаль – Сонет 34
- Justification by William Strode
- Sonnet 105: Let not my love be called idolatry by William Shakespeare
- Robert Burns: Hey, The Dusty Miller:
- As I Walk These Broad, Majestic Days. by Walt Whitman
- Ad Piscatorem by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Mother’s Day, 1993 by Todd H. C. Fischer
- Minoan Porcelain
- Eddi’s Service by Rudyard Kipling
- Those Born In Obscure Times poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Expostulation and Reply by William Wordsworth
- Hyperion. Book II poem – John Keats poems
- Stanzas Written In My Pocket Copy Of Thomson’s “Castle Of Indolence” by William Wordsworth
- nursery_rhyme_for_a_twenty_first_birthday.html
- English Poetry. Rupert Chawner Brooke. The Vision of the Archangels. Руперт Брук.
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 English Flag by Rudyard Kipling
- The Egg-Shell by Rudyard Kipling
- The ‘eathen by Rudyard Kipling
- The Dove of Dacca by Rudyard Kipling
- The Destroyers by Rudyard Kipling
- The Derelict by Rudyard Kipling
- The Deep-Sea Cables by Rudyard Kipling
- The Declaration of London by Rudyard Kipling
- The Dead King by Rudyard Kipling
- The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling
- The Craftsman by Rudyard Kipling
- The Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling
- The Comforters by Rudyard Kipling
- The Coastwise Lights by Rudyard Kipling
- The Children’s Song by Rudyard Kipling
- The Captive by Rudyard Kipling
- The Burial by Rudyard Kipling
- The Broken Men by Rudyard Kipling
- The Betrothed by Rudyard Kipling
- The Benefactors by Rudyard Kipling
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