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:
- The Gift by Sara Teasdale
- Against Fruition
- Fireflies in the Garden by Robert Frost
- O You Who’ve gone on Pilgrimage by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Гавриил Державин – Жуковскому и Родзянке, приславшим с большими похвалами автору перевод его оды «Бог» на французском языке
- A Tribute to Mr J. Graham Henderson, The World’s Fair Judge by William Topaz McGonagall
- Olney Hymn 23: Pleading For And With Youth by William Cowper
- Владимир Степанов – Следом за летом осень
- Sonnet 149: Canst thou, O cruel, say I love thee not by William Shakespeare
- Stepping Backward
- Robert Burns: How Long And Dreary Is The Night :
- Robert Burns: Young Jockie Was The Blythest Lad:
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня Попугая
- Михаил Ломоносов – Надпись на иллюминацию 1747 года перед зимним домом
- Нина Воронель – Маме
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
- I Heard You, Solemn-sweet Pipes of the Organ. by Walt Whitman
- I hear it was Charged against Me. by Walt Whitman
- I Hear America Singing. by Walt Whitman
- I Dream’d in a Dream. by Walt Whitman
- I am He that Aches with Love. by Walt Whitman
- Hush’d be the Camps To-day. by Walt Whitman
- How Solemn as One by One. by Walt Whitman
- Hours Continuing Long. by Walt Whitman
- Here the Frailest Leaves of Me. by Walt Whitman
- Here, Sailor. by Walt Whitman
- Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour. by Walt Whitman
- Great are the Myths. by Walt Whitman
- Gods. by Walt Whitman
- Gliding Over All. by Walt Whitman
- Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun. by Walt Whitman
- Germs. by Walt Whitman
- Full of Life, Now. by Walt Whitman
- From Paumanok Starting. by Walt Whitman
- From My Last Years. by Walt Whitman
- From Far Dakota’s Cañons. by Walt Whitman
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
